👏👏👏 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 because I have autism I sometimes went about it 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 also wondered if I even deserved or had the right to feel it given how others always reacted angrily to mistakes I made in love no 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 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 the 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 who 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.
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 because I have autism I sometimes went about it 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 also wondered if I even deserved or had the right to feel it given how others always reacted angrily to mistakes I made in love no 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 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 the 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 who 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.
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