When I went on Amazon just now to make sure I hadn’t missed any of Jennifer Moxley’s books, I noticed that one of the lists linked to her name was called “Wonderfulness in Poetry,” and there I had the title for my post.
I get on semi-OCDish tears about writers. I’m on one now about Jennifer Moxley, and I think it will last. I’ve always been in awe of her lush and intricate lyric poems, so sui generis, so quietly insistent on their excellence, but her last two books have taken her in new directions, and me with her.
This summer I read her mammoth (633 pages) addictive memoir The Middle Room, which traces her development as a poet and a sentient being amid a group of fellow artists at San Diego State University in the 1980s. I’d picked it up on someone’s recommendation, began it half-expecting not to persist all the way through. The next thing I knew, I sat at the local pool for five hours without moving from my lawn chair, while my daughter swam and asked for attention I gave her only perfunctorily.
TMR reads like a 19th-century comic novel (Moxley refers repeatedly to her “nostalgic longings”): a tale where you can’t wait to find out what happens next (will they/won’t they get to bed is one of the repeated dramas, as well as will she/won’t she find poetic integrity), plus habitual explorations of the heroine’s mind-states (“There was a secret force deep in my psyche which, like a Cold War double agent, worked in tandem with my insecurity, a sort of wicked interior spy that emerged at the most inopportune moments to make sport of all my fears and fill me with crippling self-doubt as regards my natural fitness to live the life of the mind.”) It’s hilarious and moving and intellectually rigorous, and takes the reader up only until, at the age of 26, she moves to Providence after her mother’s death with Steve Evans, her longtime crush.
To be continued.