Extra blog- Erin Belieu

This week I chose Erin Belieu to write a few lines about. In her poem entitled “Of the Poet’s Youth”, she is speaking about her past, tries to recollect her past memories, events and friends. She is talking to Sandy, who used to be “the deluxe doll, modish and pert”, and she calls their past “our halcyon days”. Were these days really so special and unique? We get to know that they were eating hash brownies; they were having sex all the time, so their life was similar to that of the hippies in the 60s. Interestingly, El Camino, this very religious way of pilgrims is mentioned. It is strangely connected to their dissolute life, where no one was looking for the possibility of a purer heart and soul—as it would be expected during a pilgrimage. Compared to the present, “Those were immortal times, Sandy! Coke wasn’t addictive yet, condoms prevented herpes / and men were only a form of practice for the Russian novel / we foolishly hoped our lives would become.” So her present must be very bad and annoying if she wants to get back these old days, where nothing was real, even hopes were fakes, obviously Coke was addictive that time as well, and men did not just die as they do in Russian novels. After the description of the past, we have some present day situations, and we know that sixteen years have passed since the good old days. “My estranged husband house-sits for a spoiled cockatoo while saving to buy his own place. My lover’s gone back / to his gin and the farm-team fiancée he keeps in New York.” So after sixteen years, she has an estranged husband, who wants to be separated from her and at the same time, she has a lover who has a fiancée. Her life is not much better than it used to be in the past, but the worst thing is that now she is emotionally alone, no one is willing to be with her forever, and presumably her lover is going to leave her, this is just the matter of time. The next line tells us she is a mom, and strangely she reads Frank O’Hara to her three-year old child before he goes to bed. Why O’Hara? He is not supposed to be read for little children like hers, I think he would rather listen to some fairy tales and not O’Hara. This may express that his mother does not believe in fairy tales anymore, her life is in ruins, everything is against her, so she does not want her son to believe in miracles and fairies, as they do not exist and will never help him in his life. She does not want her son to have the same kind of life she has now. The next lines say “Tonight, I find you in a box I once marked ‘The Past’. Well, / therapy’s good for some things, Sandy…” Putting our past in an imaginary box and not dealing with it for a while is sometimes suggested by psychologists, but she is not sure if this method really works, as the last line says: “I don’t know anything.” And also, she does not expect anything from her life, things will not change.