👏👏👏 Liza, you did such a wonderful job on this article! You explained perfectly why writing about love in your poetry is hardly exclusive to you personally and tracing your evolution as a poet. You had a rough go of it in Academia where you were unceremoniously given the boot from Columbia’s PhD program because you rightly wrote that Silvia Plath’s masterpiece Daddy isn’t about feminist empowerment. Then you wrote a paper that analyzed T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” and satirically concluded that Eliot must have been gay. You were done with woke leftist academia after that. Understandably, it left you scarred and you felt like poetry was being abused and used for purposes that were never intended. Poetry didn’t need to be about social justice, feminism or racism all the time, that was NOT the point of it.
So you started writing your own poetry and tried to get it out there to the world. But only a few copies of Broken Weekend were purchased and only by your friends and family. You were very frustrated at this point. You left Chicago and moved out to Manhattan and started experiencing real life for the first time. You had your heart broken way to many times and were dismissed from your first job. Nonetheless, you were enjoying truly living your life for the first time. But you weren’t getting a good reception from the poetry community on your works and felt like they were just too juvenile. So you started writing poetry that everyone wanted you to write. But in time, you came to see that you writing about love was perfectly okay because love is a universal human emotion we all experience.
Desire is a part of who are as human beings. We all find ourselves feeling a close attachment to someone of the opposite sex who we are fond of. Heartbreak is also a universal part of the human experience. When someone who you love doesn’t love you back or you go through a break up or divorce that is agony and in the most serious cases can break someone. These are not at all things that just apply to Liza Libes but all people everywhere from Boston to Baton Rouge, from London to Lagos, from Cairo to Cape Town, from Munich to Marrakesh, from Buenos Aries to Barcelona. It’s something I’ve struggled with myself as a person on the autism spectrum. I’ve been shamed, bullied and teased about being in love with other people and it didn’t go well because I have autism I sometimes went about expressing it in ways I didn’t realize were socially awkward or inappropriate. I often wondered if any woman especially if they were neurotypical, would ever love or marry an autistic man. I also often have wondered if I even deserved or had the right to feel it given how others always reacted angrily to mistakes I made in love not knowing any better because I wasn’t born dialed into the social cues most people are.
That is why the theme of Girl Soldier resonates with me. That is why the universal theme of love connects to me. I felt for years in my life due to the above mentioned bad experiences, like I was a societal outcast like Frankenstein or the Hunchback of Notre Dame who wasn’t worthy of or should be allowed to experience feeling love for another person or feeling heartbroken about all these beautiful women I was interested in but could never even approach them because I had already decided they’d never accept me for who I am. I could never have a family or children, my kids would grow up to be freaks like myself I thought, my future wife if she be neurotypical, would be asked by everyone how she could love or marry a r****d and isn’t she worried how her future kids will turn out?
The same is true when it comes to mental health. Could I truly ever find someone who would love a person who some would deem crazy? Love is truly something I’ve struggled with. But when I read what you wrote here Liza and about the universal themes contained within Girl Soldier it helps me to remember I am NOT the only one who struggles in love and it’s NOT just disabled people or people with mental health issues that struggle with these things-it’s everybody. You don’t have to be disabled to feel rejected or unwanted though the reasons might be different, the feelings that result are the same to us all. Furthermore, love is something available to us all and we all have a right to it. You found it and so can I. It doesn’t matter who we are we deserve it and we have the right to feel it and partake in it because we are ALL part of the universal human family.
Love is something that throughout history has been fought over and has been denied to some groups of people. Interracial and same-sex relationships were deemed to be disgusting and wrong. Interfaith relationships were and are to this day disapproved of. Marrying someone from the wrong family or social class was considered unacceptable as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. How about this folks: how about we let people love who they want to love? I don’t care if a white person loves a black person, a man loves a man, a Christian loves a Jew or a Muslim, a poor or working class person loves a rich person, or a Hatfield loves a McCoy, good for them, it’s not your or my business! You don’t get to decide nor does the government, who can live with or who can marry who! I don’t care if a guy on the spectrum loves a neurotypical girl or an American is married to or dating a German, Frenchman or Italian. Who gives a d***?! Just let them be happy!
Also, what you mentioned about the universities using poetry to put forward social justice messages and hackney left-wing political agendas makes me think perhaps this is why it’s a good thing that for example, President Trump took over the Kennedy Center. The Humanities have been contaminated by all this woke propaganda. This is exactly why I applauded the Trump administration for reviewing America’s museums. For example the Smithsonian saying Cubans fled Cuba under Fidel Castro because…of U.S. foreign policy? That slavery was exclusively something done by white people or the United States and that American slavery was uniquely brutal? Having exhibits about how gender testing sports isn’t fair? Come on! On the subject of slavery, no American slavery wasn’t all about race. Yes, slavey was race based and a system of white supremacy came along with it. But here are some facts the Smithsonian didn’t share with you. These people weren’t enslaved because they were black but because they were vulnerable. Their color was just used as an excuse to keep them enslaved and use them for economic exploitation.
Slaveowners needed a justification to keep them in bondage so they used their race as an excuse saying it made them inherently inferior. Furthermore, whites weren’t the only ones to own slaves in America nor were blacks the only ones to be enslaved in America. The Irish and Native Americans also were enslaved. Free blacks, mixed-race people and Native Americans also took black slaves. In fact, the first legal slave owner in American history was a black man named Anthony Johnson who came to America from Angola, he won the right to hold another black man John Casor, as his slave for life in court.
There's the paradox everyone faces in that academia does not think there's anything important about common experience because common experience has to be notably extreme in some sort of way in order to be remarkable or notable or worthy in any meaningful way. But I think you may figured out how to play their game your own way by showing differential conflict in the ordinary. Such as Girl Soldier. A girl can still be feminine even viewed through a nonobjectified nongenderal context allowed by broading the scope of the word soldier. Which doesn't necessarily show confrontational opposition between genders but similarity without all the usual confrontational gender politics. That should be more important because it supports survival instead of disintegration. More friendly emotions aren't necessarily cliche if viewed through a slightly different lense. Academia is a bored mostly manopoly where close observation is crippled by one or more fixed attitudes. So you are making your own way on your own terms. So this a great post that will likely inspire struggling poets or people who want to write poetry but may feel stymied by somewhat artificial academic attitudes that at the end of the day are awfully shallow compared to the deep diver dives of the classics. So looking forward to reading Girl Soldier.
You must follow your truth, as well write it your truth, Though it lead to disaster & dishonor, in the eyes and affection of your fellow man and woman. If you hold true and steadfast to your opinion and thought, well your truth will allow you to suffer whatever hardship may befall you for your “insolence”for uttering the “truth,” as you understood it to be.
The world ultimately is guided by stubborn people who will not be silenced or enticed to get along to go along. it has it is as Teddy Roosevelt said “ The contest goes to the man or woman who is in the ring, who is in the fight, who refuses to concede to so out, when they know they are right to a moral certainty.
I think you can live with yourself and live with the consequences of your truth.
This is the motto of whistleblowers. The idea that you were suppressed academically for speaking your opinion, speaking your truth, is disgusting.
You are the stronger person for your stance,
For holding fast to your truth!!
Courage dear heart ♥️ and may you always lead with truth and courage!
Bayonets ! Now Forward, All! Let us take yonder Ramparts from our enemies or in the effort perished all! Onward to Glory! Bravehearts!
“England expects that every man will do his duty." - Lord Admiral Horacio Nelson, Battle of Trafalgar. Message sent by nautical message flags to all hands in the British fleet!
"In a world determined to undermine memory, beauty, love, and desire, Girl Soldier argues that these ideas still matter." That should be the blurb on the back of the book.
Thank you for writing this very interesting glimpse into your process and your development. The honest self-critique here is balm for me after reading endless self-promotion elsewhere. My very early poems were mostly extremely philosophical and abstract (imagine a teen-age German Romantic trying to write with the half-mastered toolkit of Coleridge.) Like you, I am wrestling with what is considered "artistically mature" or "worthwhile" in a poem nowadays. I find that I simply do not like most of what editors are selecting in contemporary poetry. Alas, the feeling seems to be mutual.
You have staked out a position from which you write. I think that is essential; otherwise you're just twisting in the wind, writing to please fashions. It is unfortunate that your position is not the one which is most popular or easily published, but again, this is YOU writing, and what would be the point after all, if you were merely wallowing down the flow of the mainstream in a flaccid poetical inner-tube? Striking out across country to set up camp is infinitely harder and infinitely more rewarding, regardless of publication.
Only recently have I started to write from any kind of personal experience. I usually write about things, events or people other than myself. Mostly, after my novice pieces, I have written through various personae (a 16th century Portuguese sailor becalmed at sea and slowly going mad; the religious meditations of an old lioness; a set of instructions for running mad, which I imagined, but did not indicate, as being penned by Merlin after he ran mad in the forest of Broceliande; etc.). Many years ago, I gave a reading and one woman in the audience came up to me afterwards and said "I really like your poems. They're not about someone's inner life." I responded, "I'm a mathematician, I don't have an inner life." Well, that's not quite true, but it made a good quip. That is my one moment of vindication so far for my choice to write about things instead of about me.
You may find a similar difficulty if what you love most, what really moves you, isn't what moves most people. Universalizing your experience is easier if you have a commonplace heart and soul but an uncommon expressiveness; then your route to your audience is easy. The real challenge, the hard thing one feels compelled to do, is to share with one's readers a love for something that they do not love, perhaps cannot even perceive; to say what cannot directly be said; to cast a net of words over the invisible shape and make it perceptible. Shakespeare characterized poets as "giving a local habitation and a form \ to airy nothing," which is almost right -- except that it's not nothing, it only looks like nothing until one learns to see it. Then it is real. But most of the time, you will get the polite, uncomprehending response of Polonius, "oh, very like a whale."
About private personal experiences in poems: in some of your earlier poems, I did not feel that I was invited in to the experience. You were referencing something but it remained opaque, and so there was a sense that you were asking the reader to feel what you feel without knowing what you know. That's a heavier lift for the reader and requires a high degree of trust, like being led blindfolded through unknown terrain. Your more recent poems have become more accessible and hence more enjoyable (although I have enjoyed your earlier poems as well, just not as much as the more recent ones). I have your first three published volumes, and I will certainly get Girl Soldier when it comes out. I look forward to it.
Another lovely insight into your life as a writer. Congratulations on publishing your chapbooks. Good whiskey, wine and poems tend to be better with care and age. It appears you’ve found that out, at such a young age too. As my Father would say “don’t let the bastards get you down” Your voice is like John the Baptist’s.
Poetry is written about beauty as it is divorced from what is not by the archaic, and desire is beauty because our desires are predominated by our powers, our powers are fantasia and evince our desires through either the wild or time or knowledge - so poetry is called poetry and not memiors.
id read, ill probably buy it in september or october
👏👏👏 Liza, you did such a wonderful job on this article! You explained perfectly why writing about love in your poetry is hardly exclusive to you personally and tracing your evolution as a poet. You had a rough go of it in Academia where you were unceremoniously given the boot from Columbia’s PhD program because you rightly wrote that Silvia Plath’s masterpiece Daddy isn’t about feminist empowerment. Then you wrote a paper that analyzed T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” and satirically concluded that Eliot must have been gay. You were done with woke leftist academia after that. Understandably, it left you scarred and you felt like poetry was being abused and used for purposes that were never intended. Poetry didn’t need to be about social justice, feminism or racism all the time, that was NOT the point of it.
So you started writing your own poetry and tried to get it out there to the world. But only a few copies of Broken Weekend were purchased and only by your friends and family. You were very frustrated at this point. You left Chicago and moved out to Manhattan and started experiencing real life for the first time. You had your heart broken way to many times and were dismissed from your first job. Nonetheless, you were enjoying truly living your life for the first time. But you weren’t getting a good reception from the poetry community on your works and felt like they were just too juvenile. So you started writing poetry that everyone wanted you to write. But in time, you came to see that you writing about love was perfectly okay because love is a universal human emotion we all experience.
Desire is a part of who are as human beings. We all find ourselves feeling a close attachment to someone of the opposite sex who we are fond of. Heartbreak is also a universal part of the human experience. When someone who you love doesn’t love you back or you go through a break up or divorce that is agony and in the most serious cases can break someone. These are not at all things that just apply to Liza Libes but all people everywhere from Boston to Baton Rouge, from London to Lagos, from Cairo to Cape Town, from Munich to Marrakesh, from Buenos Aries to Barcelona. It’s something I’ve struggled with myself as a person on the autism spectrum. I’ve been shamed, bullied and teased about being in love with other people and it didn’t go well because I have autism I sometimes went about expressing it in ways I didn’t realize were socially awkward or inappropriate. I often wondered if any woman especially if they were neurotypical, would ever love or marry an autistic man. I also often have wondered if I even deserved or had the right to feel it given how others always reacted angrily to mistakes I made in love not knowing any better because I wasn’t born dialed into the social cues most people are.
That is why the theme of Girl Soldier resonates with me. That is why the universal theme of love connects to me. I felt for years in my life due to the above mentioned bad experiences, like I was a societal outcast like Frankenstein or the Hunchback of Notre Dame who wasn’t worthy of or should be allowed to experience feeling love for another person or feeling heartbroken about all these beautiful women I was interested in but could never even approach them because I had already decided they’d never accept me for who I am. I could never have a family or children, my kids would grow up to be freaks like myself I thought, my future wife if she be neurotypical, would be asked by everyone how she could love or marry a r****d and isn’t she worried how her future kids will turn out?
The same is true when it comes to mental health. Could I truly ever find someone who would love a person who some would deem crazy? Love is truly something I’ve struggled with. But when I read what you wrote here Liza and about the universal themes contained within Girl Soldier it helps me to remember I am NOT the only one who struggles in love and it’s NOT just disabled people or people with mental health issues that struggle with these things-it’s everybody. You don’t have to be disabled to feel rejected or unwanted though the reasons might be different, the feelings that result are the same to us all. Furthermore, love is something available to us all and we all have a right to it. You found it and so can I. It doesn’t matter who we are we deserve it and we have the right to feel it and partake in it because we are ALL part of the universal human family.
Love is something that throughout history has been fought over and has been denied to some groups of people. Interracial and same-sex relationships were deemed to be disgusting and wrong. Interfaith relationships were and are to this day disapproved of. Marrying someone from the wrong family or social class was considered unacceptable as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. How about this folks: how about we let people love who they want to love? I don’t care if a white person loves a black person, a man loves a man, a Christian loves a Jew or a Muslim, a poor or working class person loves a rich person, or a Hatfield loves a McCoy, good for them, it’s not your or my business! You don’t get to decide nor does the government, who can live with or who can marry who! I don’t care if a guy on the spectrum loves a neurotypical girl or an American is married to or dating a German, Frenchman or Italian. Who gives a d***?! Just let them be happy!
Also, what you mentioned about the universities using poetry to put forward social justice messages and hackney left-wing political agendas makes me think perhaps this is why it’s a good thing that for example, President Trump took over the Kennedy Center. The Humanities have been contaminated by all this woke propaganda. This is exactly why I applauded the Trump administration for reviewing America’s museums. For example the Smithsonian saying Cubans fled Cuba under Fidel Castro because…of U.S. foreign policy? That slavery was exclusively something done by white people or the United States and that American slavery was uniquely brutal? Having exhibits about how gender testing sports isn’t fair? Come on! On the subject of slavery, no American slavery wasn’t all about race. Yes, slavey was race based and a system of white supremacy came along with it. But here are some facts the Smithsonian didn’t share with you. These people weren’t enslaved because they were black but because they were vulnerable. Their color was just used as an excuse to keep them enslaved and use them for economic exploitation.
Slaveowners needed a justification to keep them in bondage so they used their race as an excuse saying it made them inherently inferior. Furthermore, whites weren’t the only ones to own slaves in America nor were blacks the only ones to be enslaved in America. The Irish and Native Americans also were enslaved. Free blacks, mixed-race people and Native Americans also took black slaves. In fact, the first legal slave owner in American history was a black man named Anthony Johnson who came to America from Angola, he won the right to hold another black man John Casor, as his slave for life in court.
There's the paradox everyone faces in that academia does not think there's anything important about common experience because common experience has to be notably extreme in some sort of way in order to be remarkable or notable or worthy in any meaningful way. But I think you may figured out how to play their game your own way by showing differential conflict in the ordinary. Such as Girl Soldier. A girl can still be feminine even viewed through a nonobjectified nongenderal context allowed by broading the scope of the word soldier. Which doesn't necessarily show confrontational opposition between genders but similarity without all the usual confrontational gender politics. That should be more important because it supports survival instead of disintegration. More friendly emotions aren't necessarily cliche if viewed through a slightly different lense. Academia is a bored mostly manopoly where close observation is crippled by one or more fixed attitudes. So you are making your own way on your own terms. So this a great post that will likely inspire struggling poets or people who want to write poetry but may feel stymied by somewhat artificial academic attitudes that at the end of the day are awfully shallow compared to the deep diver dives of the classics. So looking forward to reading Girl Soldier.
You must follow your truth, as well write it your truth, Though it lead to disaster & dishonor, in the eyes and affection of your fellow man and woman. If you hold true and steadfast to your opinion and thought, well your truth will allow you to suffer whatever hardship may befall you for your “insolence”for uttering the “truth,” as you understood it to be.
The world ultimately is guided by stubborn people who will not be silenced or enticed to get along to go along. it has it is as Teddy Roosevelt said “ The contest goes to the man or woman who is in the ring, who is in the fight, who refuses to concede to so out, when they know they are right to a moral certainty.
I think you can live with yourself and live with the consequences of your truth.
This is the motto of whistleblowers. The idea that you were suppressed academically for speaking your opinion, speaking your truth, is disgusting.
You are the stronger person for your stance,
For holding fast to your truth!!
Courage dear heart ♥️ and may you always lead with truth and courage!
Bayonets ! Now Forward, All! Let us take yonder Ramparts from our enemies or in the effort perished all! Onward to Glory! Bravehearts!
“England expects that every man will do his duty." - Lord Admiral Horacio Nelson, Battle of Trafalgar. Message sent by nautical message flags to all hands in the British fleet!
To thine Own Self Be True! Will S.
Own self be true said the great Bard
"In a world determined to undermine memory, beauty, love, and desire, Girl Soldier argues that these ideas still matter." That should be the blurb on the back of the book.
Thought this post on married love poetry might of interest here: https://wildsonnets.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-married-love-poetry
Thank you for writing this very interesting glimpse into your process and your development. The honest self-critique here is balm for me after reading endless self-promotion elsewhere. My very early poems were mostly extremely philosophical and abstract (imagine a teen-age German Romantic trying to write with the half-mastered toolkit of Coleridge.) Like you, I am wrestling with what is considered "artistically mature" or "worthwhile" in a poem nowadays. I find that I simply do not like most of what editors are selecting in contemporary poetry. Alas, the feeling seems to be mutual.
You have staked out a position from which you write. I think that is essential; otherwise you're just twisting in the wind, writing to please fashions. It is unfortunate that your position is not the one which is most popular or easily published, but again, this is YOU writing, and what would be the point after all, if you were merely wallowing down the flow of the mainstream in a flaccid poetical inner-tube? Striking out across country to set up camp is infinitely harder and infinitely more rewarding, regardless of publication.
Only recently have I started to write from any kind of personal experience. I usually write about things, events or people other than myself. Mostly, after my novice pieces, I have written through various personae (a 16th century Portuguese sailor becalmed at sea and slowly going mad; the religious meditations of an old lioness; a set of instructions for running mad, which I imagined, but did not indicate, as being penned by Merlin after he ran mad in the forest of Broceliande; etc.). Many years ago, I gave a reading and one woman in the audience came up to me afterwards and said "I really like your poems. They're not about someone's inner life." I responded, "I'm a mathematician, I don't have an inner life." Well, that's not quite true, but it made a good quip. That is my one moment of vindication so far for my choice to write about things instead of about me.
You may find a similar difficulty if what you love most, what really moves you, isn't what moves most people. Universalizing your experience is easier if you have a commonplace heart and soul but an uncommon expressiveness; then your route to your audience is easy. The real challenge, the hard thing one feels compelled to do, is to share with one's readers a love for something that they do not love, perhaps cannot even perceive; to say what cannot directly be said; to cast a net of words over the invisible shape and make it perceptible. Shakespeare characterized poets as "giving a local habitation and a form \ to airy nothing," which is almost right -- except that it's not nothing, it only looks like nothing until one learns to see it. Then it is real. But most of the time, you will get the polite, uncomprehending response of Polonius, "oh, very like a whale."
About private personal experiences in poems: in some of your earlier poems, I did not feel that I was invited in to the experience. You were referencing something but it remained opaque, and so there was a sense that you were asking the reader to feel what you feel without knowing what you know. That's a heavier lift for the reader and requires a high degree of trust, like being led blindfolded through unknown terrain. Your more recent poems have become more accessible and hence more enjoyable (although I have enjoyed your earlier poems as well, just not as much as the more recent ones). I have your first three published volumes, and I will certainly get Girl Soldier when it comes out. I look forward to it.
Another lovely insight into your life as a writer. Congratulations on publishing your chapbooks. Good whiskey, wine and poems tend to be better with care and age. It appears you’ve found that out, at such a young age too. As my Father would say “don’t let the bastards get you down” Your voice is like John the Baptist’s.
Poetry is written about beauty as it is divorced from what is not by the archaic, and desire is beauty because our desires are predominated by our powers, our powers are fantasia and evince our desires through either the wild or time or knowledge - so poetry is called poetry and not memiors.
id read, ill probably buy it in september or october