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    I Want to Tell You
    I Want to Tell You
    I Want to Tell You
    Ebook77 pages33 minutes

    I Want to Tell You

    By Jesse Lee Kercheval

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
    Release dateJan 31, 2023
    ISBN9780822989950
    I Want to Tell You
    Author

    Jesse Lee Kercheval

    Jesse Lee Kercheval is a professor emerita at the University Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and the translator of ten books of Uruguayan poetry.

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      Book preview

      I Want to Tell You - Jesse Lee Kercheval

      I WANT TO TELL YOU

      I heard Joyce Carol Oates say writing

      was like pushing a pea                across a warehouse with your nose

      you crawl crawl crawl along

      & when you look up—

      dirty floorboards as far as you can see stretching                to forever.

      I think she was talking about a novel.

      I think she was talking about Blonde

      a novel she was writing about Marilyn Monroe.

      I am talking about this poem.

      Pea & no princess, nose in the dirt

      pushing pushing pushing & so little progress.

      I am talking about poetry.

      I am talking about breaking out of the neat little box of humorous lines

      rising to a                            zing

      of cosmic meaning at the end.

      I know—I’ve written them too.             Still do—

      poems too damn much like Methodist sermons.

      First the joke about little Johnny & God

      (Johnny thinks the hymn Bringing the Sheaves is Bringing in The Sheets!—

      I always thought it was Bringing in the Sheep—

      Oh well guess I’m damned).

      Then the metaphor about how the minister’s windshield wipers

      not working in a terrible rain storm

      is like trying to fathom

      The Will of God

      (in both cases you have no idea where you are going).

      A quick reference to scripture   & pass the plate.

      What about everything this sermon/ my poem has left unsaid?

      About how we are dying all dying                    how people I love are already dead ?

      this year                                         my sister-in-law

      sixteen years ago in April            my mom

      eighteen years Tuesday                my dad

      in a day or a decade                      me                & you too       don’t kid yourself

      My daughter told me she doesn’t want to die          or get married

      Some days I know just what she means

      Now in the other room I hear her & two friends who spent the night singing

      LoveLoveLoveLoveLove     Makes the World Go Round

      My daughter who turned 12 last night—New Year’s Eve—

      & we all stood on the frozen grass of the Capitol square

      watching fireworks                explode off          the glass bank across the street

      Glad that’s not our bank my husband said

      when he saw the fireman poised           hoses at the ready

      Hey just like ‘Nam he added as a joke though he would know

      Each concussion         a fist          in the chest

      Each burst red/green/gold sizzling twisting

      stars falling out of the universe & into our eyes

      I start to laugh & I start to cry

      & even                       at the end of this book

      I’ll still have no earthly idea why

      GOD HAS NO NAME.

      My great grandmother had many

      but no one knows them now.

      My name is Jesse. I write this to remember.

      My mother’s name was Olive,

      her mother’s name was Ethel.

      Will I live long enough—I wonder—

      to see Ethel back in style?

      My mother also had a cousin Cumi—

      Talitha Cumi, Jesus said & raised her from

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