The Freedom of Overcoming Pre-Buyer's Remorse is Sheer Poetry

Good golly, I am in a good mood today. It's friday, I have a show tonight, great plans with friends(happy birthday Nathan!) tomorrow, some good e-mails to read this morning, and I have new poetry to read. I have been back on a reading frenzy since the New Year began. I used to be a book feind, but then I went through a period where I couldn't read with out getting anxiety attacks. This was during "The Lost Years" or "The Found Years" (however you want to look at it), after everything in my life decided to take a dirt nap, including simple pleasures like reading. It's been a slow climb back, but I feel as if I have been making up for lost time these last few months, reading in heaps (or volumes, as they say). I rush back to books again and more recently, poetry.

I don't remember the last time I let myself buy a book of poems. Books, although I crave them, I have a hard time letting myself buy. It's one of those "luxury" items that I weirdly deprive myself of. Usually when I get up the nerve to go buy a book, I have pre-buyer's remorse and I sometimes talk myslef out of it. There are a stack of books I've wanted for YEARS, and still, strangely, I have never let myself buy them. Mostly, they are art books, like Dan Eldon's The Journey is the Destination. I have wanted this book literally since it was published--when? since 1998?? And STILL I don't allow myself to get it. My friend Jen finally bought me Sally Mann's lush book of photographs, Immediate Family, and I had craved and coveted that book for TEN YEARS.

Yesterday, I was thinking about books that I would really like to read and two books of poetry came to mind: New & Selected Poems, Vol.1 by Mary Oliver and the Collected Poems by Nikki Giovanni. I have wanted these books for FOUR YEARS. I have visited them countless times in bookstores, and checked them out of libraries, but never brought them to my home to stay. I asked myself, why the heck didn't I get one? Seriously, at $16.00, it's a relatively cheap thrill--one that will keep me well-fed for a long, long time. Certainly better fed than the $2.00 cups of coffee that I sometimes indulge in. So, in a fit of inspiration, I went to the bookstore last night afterwork. It seemed so INDULGENT to peruse all those shelves HEAPING with poetry. I felt downright excited, the way you did as a kid when suddenly, out of the blue, a parent or a relative said, "Here's $5.00. We'll go to Toys 'R' Us and you can get ANYTHING YOU WANT." It made you shake in your sneakers, you were so BESIDE YOURSELF. And then when you got to that fuscia colored hallway with all the Barbie accessories, you thought you would faint. It was like that. I was giving myself the green light to get my heart's desire. I was telling myself: TAKE YOUR PICK.

I picked up the copy of Mary Oliver's book and then I spied the Nikki Giovanni book. Oh, no, which one to get? I walked around with both of them in my arms for awhile. One book was a big deal enough, I just COULDN'T GET BOTH. Then that old pre-buyer's remorse kicked in. "Oh, you don't want to spend your money on this, do you?" The old engine kicked in. Luckily, I had prepared for it, buy remindind myself that this voice ALWAYS comes up. So I got quiet and asked myself that old SARKism: What is my most ALIVE choice in this moment? And QUICKLY, like A SHOT, my heart said: BUY BOTH BOOKS.

So I did. AND I AM SO HAPPY! I read some of my favorite poems to Graham over coffee this morning, and I *SIGHED* at Bedford Avenue and at Union Square on the subway and then again at 33rd street and finally at Grand Central Station. Poems are perhaps the best kept secret. They are small devils that slip into your coat and yet THEY CARRY YOU out into the world and back home again.