Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Inventing Difficulty. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, Poetry, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of upstreet.

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Praise for Jessica Greenbaum's Inventing Difficulty: "These are tough, passionate poems that spring from an urgency both intellectual and primal. They are wry, hilarious, and wacky at times, heartbreakingly sad at others. Jessica Greenbaum brings a sparkling imagination and a vital, divine impatience to American poetry. How we need her, right about now!"--Phillip Lopate

Praise for Jessica Greenbaum's Inventing Difficulty:"A sinewy, vividly intelligent humanity gives to this collection its memorable voice. In one sense, Jessica Greenbaum's poems are incisively local--that Brooklyn landscape out of Whitman and Hart Crane. In another sense, however, they tell of the larger sadness and recognitions of our century. They 'design their world through love' and scrupulous observation. A first book by a poet very much to be listened to."--George Steiner

Praise for Jessica Greenbaum's Inventing Difficulty: "I have known and admired Jessica Greenbaum's work for many years. It keeps getting better--also harder to describe, in its entrancing blend of the hard-edged and lyrical, the chatty and tragic, the passionate and wry. Greenbaum is mistress of a recognizably urban but also piercingly individual style. Her poetry is full of brilliant phrases but it also respects ambivalence and loss, the silences between people and things, the heartache inhering in the most loving family. Inventing Difficulty is a welcome debut volume by a wonderful poet."--Rachel Hadas

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The Two Yvonnes

PoemsBy JESSICA GREENBAUM

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2012 Jessica Greenbaum
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15663-7

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................ixNext Door..........................................................1Promised Town......................................................3House Phone........................................................5Anthology..........................................................7What We Read Then..................................................9The First, Youngest Men............................................11Seven, Seven, Seventy-Seven........................................12The Voice of Peace.................................................14Houston in the Early Eighties......................................15Without Measure....................................................17Stowaway's Ascent..................................................18One Key............................................................19Packing Slip.......................................................21A Line from Jimi Hendrix Comes to Mind.............................22Early April........................................................23"This" and "That"..................................................24When My Daughter Got Sick..........................................25Beauty's Rearrangements............................................26What For is For....................................................28Before.............................................................29Cosmic Page........................................................30A Poem for S.......................................................31Little White Truck.................................................32Sonnets for the Autobiographical Urban Dweller.....................33Baldo's............................................................34Perfume's Journey..................................................35Little "the" Rules the World.......................................37Gardens, Passover..................................................38Streaming Nancy....................................................39The Use of Metaphor................................................42God................................................................43The Gold Standard..................................................44Marriage Made in Brooklyn..........................................45Gratitude's Anniversary............................................47What to Expect.....................................................48My Hands in Winter.................................................49Firefly............................................................50One Block from the Navy Yard.......................................51The Moment We Can't Stay...........................................52For You Today......................................................53No Ideas but in Things.............................................54The Two Yvonnes....................................................56Dedications........................................................58

Chapter One

    Next Door


    Robbie Gross is dribbling, then fakes a shot, then takes it,
    the metronome of his solo practice an accompaniment
    so persistently tapping its foot in my days that, 4 a.m.,
    forty years later, hearing a basketball tock
    on the sidewalk below my window, I am returned
    to my first room, separated by a mulberry tree
    and hedges from where Robbie Gross is dribbling, then
    fakes a shot, then takes it, the metronome so persistently
    tapping its foot in my days that I knew we were keeping time
    but what song was it during games with our older brothers
    and after they left, shooting by himself, like the tree
    alone falling, morning and long afternoon, through my
    books, through all my ages-what song? I broke
    the court's code and deciphered the slow dribble's: I'll.
    Wait. While the shooter sized up the competition or
    focused his solitary mind, and then the bomb-fuse ticktickticktick
    while he feinted right, moved left, setting up the shot
    and the listener (not trying to listen) and then the blank
    space of the arcing quiet as he shoots. That silence
    is also like the space between the reader and the page,
    the little nation between the writer's words and our
    particular way of receiving them, or the blank station
    we fill in between ourselves and passing strangers,
    or between ourselves and people we presume to know,
    but most achingly in the ones we try to know.
    Then came my guess whether the shot went in, hit the rim or
    bounced off the garage, because I had the misfortune
    of growing up next-door friends with the pudgy Rob Gross
    who became the most handsome Robbie, growing taut
    and sly for having played from the outside line for so long
    and by his last June when the beautiful Margie Harmelin
    rode over from her neighborhood and lay her bicycle
    on its side before they both went indoors, by then
    he only caught my eye with reticence, a muffled kindness
    passing to me from under his shaggy bangs,
    nearly embarrassed for me, as I now understand it,
    because he was bluff enough to know what he had become
    to any young woman, and what I was becoming in my
    blank space, my window, like this one from which I just
    heard Robbie Gross take a shot, from which I just
    dreamed hearing the song the world called "Don't. Wait."


    Promised Town

    You hoped your string of tickets
    would last all day, or someone's parent,
    protectively wandering the Fund Fair,
    would buy you more because
    as it worked out, they cared for you.
    Those were the two hopes.
    The land behind high school had never
    been bigger, or more friendly.
    Your older brother's friend,
    working the Treasure Chest booth,
    set you up behind the mound
    of keys and schooled you
    in how to fish for luck. But
    the main attraction was the fair
    itself, that it fit, nearly uniquely,
    the illustrations set before us
...