Dorothy Wordsworth by Jennifer Chang

Dorothy Wordsworth
Jennifer Chang

The daffodils can go fuck themselves.
I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings
about the spastic sun that shines and shines
and shines. How are they any different

from me? I, too, have a big messy head
on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.
I flower and don’t apologize. There’s nothing
funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,

the critics nod. They know the old joy,
that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot
of future growing things, each one
labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.

If I died falling from a helicopter, then
this would be an important poem. Then
the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore
declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous

youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren’t you
meat? But I won’t be another bashful shank.
The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,
the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop

interrupting me with your boring beauty.
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.

MARGINALIA

1.
Day 08 of The Sealey Challenge. Today’s offering is Some Say the Lark by Jennifer Chang.

2.
I’ve always regarded myself as an interior person—an interior poet—and I suppose many of those who know me would agree. My inner life is so vivid that most of the time, I would rather stay there than try to make space for myself in what surrounds me. But intrinsically, I know that to withhold myself from the shared world means to also be dispossessed of occasions for joy and wonder, and so I know I have to choose again and again to be here, to participate—to pay attention, which is our endless and proper work, as Mary Oliver has said.

3.
Reading Jennifer Chang’s Some Say the Lark, I felt the blurring of the self and the world. Have we ever truly allowed ourselves to think about the boundary that separates our interiority and what’s out there? I felt like I was witnessing the poet wrestling with nature, which in turn is also an act of wrestling with the self. To perceive life at large and then to write a poem is to also write yourself into existence—to confront what’s before you and to make space for yourself, here, now.

4.
What is the legacy of a life lived not linearly but spherically? To explore time and emotions in many layers and directions? How do I notice the world, and what truths do I choose to see or ignore?