Allison Pitinii Davis’s gedicht "Falls in Love, or Reads Spinoza" - #spinoza

“Allison Davis is the author of Poppy Seeds (2013). She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she is completing a book about her family's trucking motel,” aldus was hier te lezen. Dat werd dus haar dichtbundel Line Study of a Motel Clerk (2017)

Voor verschijnen vertelde ze erover in een uitgebreid interview: “Midwestern Gothic staffer Allison Reck talked with poet Allison Pitinii Davis about her forthcoming collection, Line Study of a Motel Clerk, working against sentimentality, writing about the intersection of Rust Belt and Jewish cultures and more.” [cf. – vandaar ook haar foto]

Het gaat hier over haar Spinozagedicht dat verscheen in de bundel:
Allison Pitinii Davis, Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017): "Two families immigrate to America’s Steel Valley and open a trucking motel and laundry. The businesses change hands through three generations as the region’s industry booms and busts. When the two disparate families become one, the new generation must examine what it means to endure in a place, a culture, a language, and a history. Line Study of a Motel Clerk examines a family’s century-long effort to make a home in a world on the move." [Amazon]

In haar autobiografische stukje “Writing the Jewish Rust Belt” op de Jewish Book Council geeft Allison Davis een fraaie schets van ervaringen uit haar joodse jeugd die de achtergrond vormen van die recentste dichtbundel – een tekst die een fraai voorbeeld is van T.S. Eliot’s criterium dat een dichter van ervaringen en denken (reflecties) erop een geheel maakt – hetgeen hun verschil met ‘gewone mensen’ aangeeft. Daar dat in het deel van Eliot’s beroemde tekst dat de dichteres citeert enigszins wegvalt leek het mij nuttig twee blogs vooraf te laten gaan: het eerste dat Eliot’s gerenomeerde essay waaruit die regels komen, aan de orde stelt; het tweede waarin Eliot’s antisemitisme en zijn houding t.o. Spinoza aan de orde komt.

In de eerste alinea “Writing the Jewish Rust Belt” komen beide zaken aan de orde. Ik citeerde die tekst in het blog van 17 april 2018, waarin ik haar gedicht signaleerde. De dichteres was zo vriendelijk mij haar gedicht toe te zenden met toestemming het in dit blog op te nemen – en in het Corpus Poeticum Spinozanum. Dat laatste wordt aanleiding om die inventarisatie van Spinoza-gedichten eindelijk eens naar dit nieuwe blog te vernieuwen. Dat ga ik zo snel mogelijk doen. Ik neem hier eerst nogmaals die eerste alinea over:

“Falls in Love, or Reads Spinoza,” a poem from my 2017 collection Line Study of a Motel Clerk, is in conversation with H. Leivick’s cycle on Spinoza and Charles Reznikoff’s “Spinoza” (1934). It is also in the tradition of rebelling against T.S. Eliot, joining Emanuel Litvinoff’s “To T.S. Eliot” (1951), Hyam Plutzik’s “For T.S.E. Only” (1955), and Philip Levine’s decision to skip meeting Eliot at a bookstore in 1953 after spending “a sleepless night wondering what I might do if Eliot were suddenly to blurt out a racist remark.” I anticipate anti-Semitism when reading Modernists, so I was prepared for Eliot’s overtly problematic poems, but nothing prepared me for this line in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921): “The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these experiences have nothing to do with each other…”. That is, unless, Spinoza is part of your worldview. That is, unless, you have a father who reads Spinoza relentlessly, who leaves a copy of Ethics on the back of the toilet so “the latter” might take a shit and read Spinoza, let alone fall in love. But Eliot didn’t grow up in my home. And he certainly didn’t have my father.” [Cf.]

 Dan nu haar gedicht:

 

Falls in Love, or Reads Spinoza 

 

“The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these experiences have nothing to do with each other . . . these experiences are always forming new wholes.” —T. S. Eliot

 

I meet a man with the final line of Spinoza’s Ethics

tattooed on his forearm. If all ink tastes like salt.

If the closer we get, the worse it grows. If in Spinoza,

Leivick writes in Yiddish “Me times me is—

you, near times near is—far,” then I am far

from my father working the motel night shift, yet I remember him reading

Spinoza over the hum

of the beer cooler, remember my father phoning

to say, “Spinoza says

we can’t recall what we forget, or forget

what we recall:

we are not free.” My father leaving dog-eared pages

of Ethics above the toilet

times Spinoza punished for having found divinity

everywhere, in the democratic

motel rooms where the saddest nights you can think of

pass for love. Then the things people do to feel

closer. Then my date shows me the door.

Then my father, dumped in school, stealing the girl’s makeup

so she’d call. The phone ringing and her father

asking, “Murray, you plan on wearing her blush

or returning it?” If we don’t choose

what we return. If we aren’t free.

 

Allison Pitinii Davis

 

Line Study of a Motel Clerk

Baobab Press, 2017

ISBN: 978-1936097135

Originally published in Black Warrior Review 41.2

baobabpress.com/books/line-study-of-a-motel-clerk/