James Copeland on Marina Temkina’s What Do You Want?: “Dear Marina,”
Ugly Duckling Presse is inviting artists and writers to respond to their favorite titles for our backlist blog series From the Vaults. Our ninth contributor is James Copeland, with a letter to Marina Temkina’s after her book, What Do You Want (2009).
Dear Marina,
I hope you don’t mind my writing you in this way. It’s been so long since we spoke. After a while, I don’t know how to start writing again, even if I miss someone and think about them a lot.
It was at your studio in Bushwick, I think, the last time we saw each other. Michel was there too. I don’t remember what you were doing that day, but what would you have been doing? Drawing and writing I imagine.
I want to have more years
of being a full-time poet & and a full-time artist.
How are you doing? It may seem strange, but I have a vivid picture of you, not as you were then, but as you might be now. I think it’s all coming from your book, What Do You Want? I think it’s a picture that was formed from that book, as if the book were a kind of movie projector, projecting your life out into an imagined space, which keeps staying in front of us, in the future, but becoming clearer with time, as if the screen itself were coming into focus.
WHAT DO YOU WANT, MICHEL?
– To be with you as much as possible, to have time together.
Lines like those, they feel like promises. They’re deeply personal, and you made them public, and in this way they became poetry. For me, it was a new kind of poetry. It was not poetry for any purpose. It was poetry to be listened to, like a human being.
THE TIME’S COMING WHEN SOMEBODY OVER THERE,
IN THE UNIVERSE, WILL BE LOOKING AT YOU
It seems so simple: the vulnerable admission, the wild directness. At times, it’s like a challenge. At other times, a collapse of all defenses. Most of the time, a transmission from you to Michel, from you to the universe, from you to me, a transmission like a boat might send out across the empty waves, using the old signal forms, but only to communicate a basic message, whether it’s mayday, or weather, or the fact of your existence.
So, it gets you thinking, back in the old days
they used to make tools intending them to last for ages,
certainly to outlive the person who made them;
they used to put a lot into making them, and there is
no winning with them when you try to take them apart,
you even feel a bit of regret that their time’s run out,
and yet they’re still indestructible.
Marina, like a lot of people, I finished my education and my head was so full of ideas, you couldn’t have squeezed another one in. Ideas, but you know, the cheap kind, that you get when you’re full of energy and know nothing. I really ought to have been sent to a sanitarium. Instead, I spent years picking up books and, instead of reading them, I had ideas about them.
I love umbrellas.
I love waterfalls.
I love wanderers.
I love dreams.
When I picked up your book, I had been trying for years to crawl out from under those ideas. The truth is, I never really understood anything anyway. And I didn’t want to anymore. I didn’t even want to be happy. I just wanted to experience imagination without being interfered with along the way.
I love bills.
I love notices.
I love papers.
I love deadlines.
I’m still trying, of course. But when I first read your book, it helped me. It moved me a little bit forward. Into the future. Where the stars are, and where the poems are, and other normal good things.
Let me know how you’re doing. I know I haven’t been a good correspondent. But it’s not too late, I hope, just to write a few lines to each other, to say how you are, what’s new, and what you would really like to see happen, one day. Take care.
James Copeland is a freelance editor. He worked at Ugly Duckling Presse from 2009 to 2011.
