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Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.
Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.
Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.
Maybe that’s why, in those moments, I formed a crazy plan. I would walk toward her, the dog by my side; I would go down on one knee right there in arrivals and ask Jill to marry me. Not because she was in love with me, or even because I was in love with her, although probably I was, but because I was beginning to see life as a series of losses—that have already happened and are happening and will inevitably happen—and no one should have to face that alone. I sure as hell didn’t want to. This could be something permanent, I thought, me and Jill and the dog. Some family. Some luck.
I didn’t, of course. I didn’t even lift her in my arms and twirl her so carefully that her dress wouldn’t ride up and expose her backside. What did I expect to come through that door? A tear-stained face, a broken woman, a damsel in distress? What came was Jill. Her face seemed, as usual, to promise access to something fundamental, some deep source of beauty and generosity that had always been just outside my reach. No one would ever have guessed at the disappointment she’d just suffered. I had some sense, then, of the energy she must have expended every minute of every day, sustaining the myth of herself.
I don’t think I write through transition periods. What happens to me is that something stops, something ends, something is brought to a closure. Then I have nothing—I’ve used up whatever it is that I had and must wait for the well to fill up again. That’s what you tell yourself, but it doesn’t feel like a sanguine experience of sitting quietly while the well fills up. It seems like an experience of desolation, loss, even a kind of panic. The thing you would wish to be doing, you can’t do. I’ve been through a lot of those periods, and what seems to happen, or what has happened in the past, is that after a year or two, or whatever the duration, another sound emerges—and it really is another sound. It’s another way of thinking about a poem or making a poem, a different kind of speech to use, from the Delphic to the demotic. Suddenly I’ll hear a line—you can’t hear this yourself when I read, because my voice tends to pasteurize everything—suddenly I’ll realize that I’m being sent some sort of message, a new path, and I try it on. That’s how things change for me—it’s never that I work my way through it. I have friends, great poets, who seem to make extraordinary use of a daily ritualized writing practice, but for me that doesn’t work at all.
Oh, I don’t think of that as truth but as literal occurrence. Truth, to me, is that which lives within experience. Sometimes you’re working from things that have happened to you in life, but you realize that it would have more force if someone other than you were speaking. Exactly transcribed lived experience will not always make the best poem possible, partly because your conclusions about what you’ve already lived are made before you start writing. What you want to have happen is that on the page you discover something. That’s when the electricity comes, so you invent stories in order to come upon discoveries, insights you haven’t yet had. That’s what I believe in.
I became quite obsessed. There was a period of two years when I read nothing but gardening catalogues. I really thought my life as a poet was over. Then I wrote The Wild Iris (1992), a book in which flowers speak. I could see that a lot of the prose from the catalogues came into the poems. One of the things I feel most strongly—and that book taught it to me—is that you have to allow yourself your obsessions. You can’t decide they’re not literary enough, or not elevated enough. I mean, it’s not that I had given myself permission to read the catalogues, but it was all I could put my mind to. I realized subsequently that this was the catalyst for a book that seemed to me at the time the best thing I’d written—it doesn’t now, but it did then.
Lately, I’ve been watching a whole lot of television, and I’m sure it will get into my work—maybe not the fact of its being television, or maybe that too, I don’t know, but the point is that I don’t feel I have a choice. You must trust that impulse in yourself, because your work is going to come out of what absorbs you. Your work is not going to come out of things you decide should absorb you.
I hate that kind of vocabulary, because it presumes that there should be an uninterrupted fluency. Block is not a word I would use, because I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write and different news to tell from that space. I’m unhappy, mostly, when I’m not writing, unless I’ve just written something, in which case I’m euphoric because I don’t have to try and write something again, but the fact of being not happy doesn’t mean that I think that I can put an end to it. I think it’s an ordeal I have to live through. I feel kind of pious about this. I keep records of what I write—I started doing this in the sixties—and I can see in my little charts that there were these years when nothing was written, an X for every month, and then when something was written it was so different from the last thing written two years before. I don’t think I could have gotten to that doing busywork for two years. I think I got there because I shut up and waited. I could be wrong—maybe that’s not why I got there and maybe I would have gotten there faster—but my sense of my experience is that you have to wait out certain nadirs. You just wait them out, and if you continue to want to write, you’ll write, and if you stop wanting to write then you’ll have a small gift, and it’s just as well to be informed of that.
My interest in unionism—and more specifically unionism in a traditionally female occupation—undoubtedly had its roots in my own particular family history and my desires to recast that history. From my father I learned male union traditions, both noble and shortsighted. The railroad brotherhood gave him a route to dignity and an alternative to upward mobility, but the battles against technological change, an inept railroad management, and the dissolving fraternity of craftsmen inspired more bitterness than hope. His union culture also offered few resources for a revaluing of the contributions and power of those outside the white male craft brotherhood. In contrast, my mother operated in inclusive ways and seemed infinitely flexible in the face of political, social, and economic upheaval. Yet she found it difficult, if not impossible, to see her own work in a nonunion department store as worthy of romance and a living wage.
Was there a working-class institution that captured the best of these traditions? One that could lay claim to rights, provide a sense of identity and power to its members while granting the same to those outside its ranks? An institution to which I as a woman could belong? Perhaps only a union built by women could forge such a vision. What I found, however, was that history resists mythology, and that my desire to revise the work and union histories of my parents was not to be fulfilled in the ways I anticipated.
Waitressing reveals the deeply gendered expectations surrounding the world of work. In the theater of eating out, the waitress plays multiple parts, each reflecting a female role. To fulfill the emotional and fantasy needs of the male customer, she quickly learns the all-too-common scripts: scolding wife, doting mother, sexy mistress, or sweet, admiring daughter. Other customers, typically female, demand obsequious and excessive service—to compensate, perhaps, for the status denied them in other encounters. For once, they are not the servers but the ones being served.