Foodstuff Friday: Génoise, the ladies room, perfectionism in poetry

I was in the ladies room with a can of frosting and a pint of rum. It was a creaky office building on Hollywood Blvd. The doors were scratched dark wood. I titrated rum into the goo. I was in my early twenties; an office manager or secretary.


This happened.

My untamed and grand approach to life had me baking three génoise layers the previous night. Because of the batter's delicacy, flour to egg to butter ratio, there was anarchy among the ingredients. My first run I created a scrambled sort of concoction. Then I got tough, called the ingredients to order (eggs and flour are more noisy than you might think) (sugar is quiet--life is full of surprise). Things worked.

Oh how fragrant the kitchen! How ebullient the light sweet sophisticated layers! But at 2 a.m., the trash can overflowing with egg shells and failed attempts, three gorgeous layers cooling on their trays, I caved. I'd be up all night if I began melting chocolate for whatever extravagant icing I had in mind.

Next day, M. joined me in the ladies room to help determine rum to icing proportions. (I'd picked up canned icing on my way in, and stuffed the Bacardi into my purse before leaving home.)

What does this have to do with poetry? I'm glad you asked and invite your ideas. My friend A. is claiming s/he's produced no publishable poetry for years. B.S.! I respond.

a) Publishable? The good, the bad, the ugly, the superb get into print and online.

b) It's impossible for A., so talented, so bright, so full of heart and shadow, to suck for so long.

c) It all tastes good. Images? Yum! Alliteration? Tasty! Fluidity? Divine! Enjambment? The surprise filling of poesy! Form? Flexible! (Anymore!) Your variations, your voice? Yes!

Three perfect génoise layers with crappy canned frosting semi-successfully flavored with Bacardi. Goes together as well as this posting, questionably, but there it was and here it is. My rule, self-rule if you will, in writing this blog is to never spend more than an hour (and usually a lot less) composing and to grab the first good image I see.

That was a good cake. I no longer bake. I still eat. I write. I make no sense. It's a blog. It's a life.

Yet More on Perfectionism: meds & poems & fear

I remember my post here about Kristin Prevallet's [I, Afterlife].*  I was sleeping maybe two hours a night by Fall 2008, and searching the streets of Manhattan for one prescription for one antidepressant I knew would help. Of course I had no insurance.

The story had a happy ending with me getting the pills (outpatient), and accepting, finally, I had to stay on them, or similar. Between the meds and being laid off, more woolly baa-ing sheep have frolicked in my bedroom in the past two years than romped in my crib (of the variety harboring infants).

Enter perfectionism, Stage Right.  My past two or so postings, by me, showed me refusing to finish one novel and two novellas, my perfectionism being a manifestation of a fear (of not being perfect or "God's perfect child" as Barbara Wilson wrote in her memoir God's Perfect Child about her Christian Science childhood).

Back to the pills.  Now that I had them I where should I store them?   I've debated--since I my twenties--delivery systems to guarantee I took daily vitamins.  Why not buy a rectangular Monday-through-Sunday pill box available at my friendly pharmacy? I'd been studying them over the years but found one far too capacious for my puny intake; another just not cute enough or too plastic or the wrong color or colors.

The above debate ended a few months ago. On a Sunday morning I shook out seven antidepressants and slapped them on the dusty top of my cranky refrigerator, then ingested one. There were six left, each of which disappeared into my waiting mouth, one-at-a-time, Monday, Tuesday and so on through Saturday. The system is no fail and has helped to regularize my vitamin takeage.

When interviewed on Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg said:

I remember I was thinking, yesterday in fact, there was a time that I was absolutely astounded because Kerouac told me that in the future literature would consist of what people actually wrote rather than what they tried to deceive other people into thinking they wrote, when they revised it later on. [Ginsberg]

Of course Ginsberg is referring to our Utopian future in Shangri La.  On the Road was a ten-year edit.  Ginsberg's poetry wasn't "automatic."  I continue to write and print out, edit, input, print out, edit, rewrite, edit, print . . . my poems and stories. And of course there's me and my pills.

I know I'm not the shining light of the poetry world, fiction world, of pretty much any world. Maybe I'd have published more earlier if I were less fearful (because that is what perfectionism is, fear . . . of mistakes, scorn, dismissal...). 

Regardless of output which is no measure of quality, I'd have lived less fearfully if I was a bit more of a perfectionism conqueror. A less fearful life?

Who deserves anything less. 

*Click on the link to read Lovingarms's posting on Kristin Prevallet's [I, Afterlife]