Self-Portrait at 30 – VIII. Be reasonable
I find six errors in the proofreading manual & the irony doesn’t tickle me.
I am enraged by typos, poor formatting, missing commas. This is my Big Girl Job,
the one I always wanted — editing books, fixing literature — though I am gutted
this means I have less time & energy to spend writing my own. In Hornsey Library,
I am pretending to compose a poem while deepthroating a banana & thinking
about Vivienne Westwood telling me to be reasonable: demand the impossible,
when he says, That’s it. That’s the look of a great poet at work & I smile
hard enough to forge new wrinkles. Happy ones. This is my job, really:
to go mad uglily, experience outrageously, love disgustingly, live
wholly, die over & over again, & write it all beautifully,
in an industry where I’ll be crucified for using adverbs.
It does not pay well. Often it does not pay at all. & yet
all of this costs me so fucking much. My poetic successes
are graffitied across the palimpsest of a pandemic.
I fear I will never write a good poem again.