my father rung poetry up on his typewriter
typing me to what he wanted to be abstract
even fancied me as “son” when me and my girl screwed
while “husband” to the freshly laid seed;
roles would lose shape in love,
our maiden names, son, daughter, not so shapely out in the world
you’d long for a nickname, friend, lover, and hope it stuck; while
there’d always be home, to accommodate and name you
when your appellation stuck like bricks and clung around you like place
one was grateful for little assurances like “ie” and “ly,”
to make you more at ease with yourself: when
“little georgie” or “billy” came to you you’d just weep …
sagas accompanied anyone with pains
a name, merely your kind of wound; surely it hurt
to be spinach, carrot, or so many greens …
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play