I’ll admit my ignorance here. All I remember of Erica Jong was her early 70’s infamous best-selling novel, Fear of Flying. I had no idea that she had become such a prolific award-winning writer. Besides being a famous author, she is also a fine poet. She says, “The poetry is the source of absolutely everything I do.” I discovered some of her impressive poems looking inside Becoming Light: New and Selected Poems, and on poetry websites PoemHunter and Poeticous.
Filled with life and passion, Jong uses breath, air, wind, “prana whistling in the dark;” and fire, “a flame in the heart,” “a living lantern,” as imaginary ways to describe the creative forces within the heart of a poet. They are beautifully expressed in these 3 poems: Alphabet Poem: To the Letter I, Poem to Kabir, and Zen & the Art of Poetry. There may be other poems with these motifs I have yet to discover, but these caught my attention for their shared imagery and theme of being a poet, a writer.
Alphabet Poem: To the Letter I (12th/last stanza, 3rd poem in Becoming Light) We are all one poet and always we have one communal name, god's name, nameless, a flame in the heart, a breath, a gust of air, prana whistling in the dark. i dies— but the breath lingers on through the medium of the magic alphabet and in its wake death is no more than metaphor. Poem to Kabir Kabir says the breath inside the breath is God & I say to Kabir you are the breath inside that breath which is not to say that the poet is God– but only that God uses the poet as the wind uses a sail. Zen & the Art of Poetry Letting the mind go, letting the pen, the breath, the movement of images in & out of the mouth go calm, go rhythmic as the rise & fall of waves, as one sits in the lotus position over the world, holding the pen so lightly that it scarcely stains the page, holding the breath in the glowing cage of the ribs, until the heart is only a living lantern fueled by breath, & the pen writes what the heart wills & the whole world goes out, goes black, but for the hard, clear stars below.
In the last section of What You Need to Be a Writer, Jong comes clean, listing her fears, then describes what it really takes to be a writer — having something to say so intensely, that it “burns like a coal in your gut…pounds like a pump in your groin,” and concludes with having “the courage to love like a wound that never heals.” Ah, the human condition.
& then there’s all I did not say: to be a writer what you need is something to say: something that burns like a hot coal in your gut something that pounds like a pump in your groin & the courage to love like a wound that never heals.
In a Mother’s Day Playboy interview last year, the first question daughter and writer Molly Jong-Fast asks her mother is how she knows things, especially what’s happening to women in the socio-political arena. Jong answers: “I think a writer is someone who lives like a wound that never heals. And if you’re a writer, you feel the rumblings in the air.” It’s interesting how she uses the same metaphor for a writer to love or live like “a wound that never heals.” How she’s been bravely living her life.
Tags: breath, creativity, Erica Jong, god, Kabir, prana, the soul, what you need to be a writer, writing as a spiritual act
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