la la La la, La La

and the guests came
and the birthday gifts on their ribboned legs came
and the cake made one guest fall in love
and the candles burned and were not blown
and the cats curled on strangers' laps
and the tea steeped, the coffee warmed
and the roses opened just in time
and the star led them in
and the star led them out
and my love moved me
and I am the happiest I've ever been

And the Dickinsonian oracle pronounces the birthday oracular pronouncement:

The lovely flowers embarrass me,
They make me regret I am not a Bee -
(E. Dickinson, 808)

Whatever

my students say they don't care if they don't have free will

they feel free they say and that's good enough for them yes it is causality is fine with us they say as long as we don't notice it

and I say well think about your desires consider if they are just brute facts about you about you unadorned or if what you desire may well be what's been made available to you what you've been presented with as an option to love to want to lust for

oh they say their eyes bigger than ever oh

Thus spoke the Dickinsonian oracle:

There is a finished feeling
Experienced at Graves -
A leisure of the Future -
A Wilderness of Size
(E. Dickinson, from 1092)

Her kind, our kind

We at Brightly are just shivering with delight as we celebrate the birthday of a most-beloved fab gal poet and scorpio sister, Anne Sexton, born on November 9, 1928, to Ralph and Mary Harvey in the idyllic just-past-Wellesley Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts. What city services does Newton offer its (presumably not dead-by-their-own hand, or dead at all) residents, you might very well ask yourself? Plenty, it seems.

Anne is suffocatingly superb. This certainly is not Precious Moments poetry:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind


And, of course, the Dickinsonian oracle -- twelve-fingered if it has any fingers at all -- offers this Sextonian birthday profession:

I heard a fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -
(E. Dickinson, from 591)

Purr poem

Today's Brightly writer spotlight falls on Amelia the cat.

Amelia is not worried about whether or not she'll convey all the nuances of utilitarianism to her students (she has no students).
Amelia is not debating about whether she ought to go for a run through the sunny southwest metropolis (Amelia doesn't have cool weather running gear).
Amelia is not pulling her hair out about all the obligations she's committed to, now that the magazine writing class has begun and that author will likely turn over his manuscript for editing at any moment and those pesky (er, dearly beloved) students will turn in their papers on Descartes or Hume or Swinburne or whomever this week (Amelia doesn't have hair -- she has fur).

And so, she's free to compose a poem for the delight of all.

The sum
of catliness crests
midmorning before
slipping behind
the neighbor's house
catch the sun nap
kitty cats.
(a poem by Amelia)

And onto the Dickinsonian oracle, which may or may not recommend napping in the place of fretting. Let's see:

Morning is due to all -
To some - the Night -
To an imperial few -
The Auroral Light -
(E. Dickinson, 1621)

Cincinnati

Cincinnati...

what's it like?

to live there, that is.

is there poetry there?

or any poets there?

IS ANYONE OUT THERE?


The oracle remains silent.

Sooner or later

Sooner or later we all find ourselves in Chodorow


do not need to be tied : wishes to develop a middle position

about self, body, other's body : or self and other

much less covert and tabooed as topics: what in the wide spectrum

all women need: gender, and an emotion, anger

one is doing something entirely different : embarrassment

without further professional training : the central role

without undermining the significance of intersubjectivity

trauma, conflict, fixation, or experience : borderline


And offering its own psychoanalytical insight, the Dickinsonian oracle says from behind the couch:

So the Eyes accost - and sunder
In an Audience -
Stamped - occasionally - forever -
So may Countenance

Entertain - without addressing
Countenance of One
In a Neighboring Horizon -
Gone - as soon as known -

O soft embalmer

Woefully, we at Brightly acknowledge having failed to honor the birthday of yet another bard, the lovely, tubercular John Keats, born in London's fog on October 31 in 1795. Though never a devoted fan, this Brightly writer appreciates the night lull of "O soft embalmer of the still midnight / Shutting with careful fingers and benign / Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light / Enshaded in forgetfulness divine..."

As does the Dickinsonian oracle, who pronounces, in respectful homage to Keats' shade:

Oh Shadow on the Grass -
Art though a Step or not?
Go make thee fair my Candidate
My nominated Heart -
Oh Shadow on the Grass
While I delay to guess
Some other thou wilt consecrate -
Oh Unelected Face -
(E. Dickinson, 1237)