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E l a i n e   E q u i   :   P r o s e - p o e m

Now That I Know What Feverfew Looks Like

 

Joe Brainard drawing - bow

What a disappointing book, and by a poet I like too. It's as if she had nothing to say, but still wanted to write and so names five or six different flowers in each poem thinking that will help. Or it seems like (at least there are hints that) something really big (and not, in fact, nothing) was going on in her life, only it was too chaotic to fit into a poem or series of poems, so she stuck with the flowers because she really wanted to write and have some measure of control over this big something or nothing (whichever it was) that she couldn't talk about, yet she didn't really want to talk about the flowers either, not with something else on her mind. And so the book ends up being of interest more for what it doesn't say yet seems to want to say rather than what it does say. And I guess I can understand that, having been there myself.
 

 

 
 

From Friendship With Things, by Elaine Equi,
published by The Figures, 1998, ISBN 0-935724-93-1
price US$8:00
The Figures, 5 Castle Hill Ave., Gt. Barrington, MA 01230
Distributed by Small Press Distribution,
1341 7th St., Berkeley, CA 94710-1403
 
Drawing by Joe Brainard, copyright © the Estate of Joe Brainard,
used with permission
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