alina Ştefănescu

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Notebook: Poems I've kept since high school.

High school. Everything started there— the copying of poems on the cover of binders, the prefacing each day’s journal entry with a verse written by a ghost, the slow seduction of language and the careful attention the poet brings to words.

There was a way of being there and not being there, entirely. Poetry was like playing hookey mentally, opting out of the classroom scenes.

Metaphorical hookey aside, the first time I skipped school, it was raining. And the rain resembled the peasant dress my great-grandmother wore in the portrait which hung on the dark wooden walls of our hallway, except that the peasant dress was intended to symbolize the rain I imagined would arrive when, suddenly and dramatically, I left school after trigonometry, knowing that my boyfriend would likely look for me – knowing he would look and worry, given that we had argued in the cafeteria earlier. But the privilege of seeing him look and worry – the very reason for which I left – was made impossible by my leaving.

As for the rain, it arrived an hour later, by which point I had already been conquered by things I was sitting on, namely, the swing shaped like a metal dragon which resided in the park a mile down the road from the school; I had already been swinging and wondering if he was still looking for me, wondering also if he had realized that there had been an argument which occurred earlier in the cafeteria, an argument which represented the struggle between my hopes for community and my commitment to him, as an individual, with extensive emotional needs, and the sort of vibratory lexicon required to communicate these needs to me, and make my head spin and spin and spin with him. Or, rather, make my head spin a bit with the words I had come to associate with the idea of him — nervy, metamorphic, sensitive, sandy, necrophobic, misunderstanding.

Perhaps nothing came of it. Perhaps poetry is the nothing that comes of things we hold close?

In honor of a new year, and poetry, here is a handful, a small dusting of poems which I first copied then, onto various surfaces — including the doors of my closet, my head, my hands. One shares such things because someone else shared them first. Something abides in these poems—-something outlasts its self. May they bring you closer to whatever you’re imagining or writing.

*Disclaimer: These poems were collected prior to the internet and the world wide web, back in the day when teens went to libraries and sat with books copying poems from them in Alabama towns where the bookstores only held Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The linked translations are not necessarily my favorite, or the best. But they were easier to find. And I erred towards ease ….

For the Anniversary of My Death” by W. S. Merwin
This world is not conclusion” by Emily Dickinson
A Confession” by Czeslaw Milsoz
December 11th” by Anne Sexton
Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand
Elegy” to Marina Tsvetaeva by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Abyss” by Charles Baudelaire
Mock Orange” by Louise Gluck
Untitled” by Cesar Pavese
“Love Songs” by A. R. Ammons
Marriage” by Gregory Corso
O Lull Me, Lull Me” by Theodore Roethke
No Childhood” by Adam Zagajewski
Recreation” by Audre Lorde
Third and Last” by Anna Akhmatova
A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde
Elegy, owed” by Bob Hicok
Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery
Vita Nova” by Louise Gluck
I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke
Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz
Two Poems for T.” by Cesar Pavese
The First Elegy” & “The Eighth Elegy” from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies
Fame is the one that does not stay—” by Emily Dickinson
Plaster Cast Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Be Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire
Knee Song” by Anne Sexton
My Faithful Mother Tongue” by Czeslaw Milosz
Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’Hara
Posthumous Remorse” by Charles Baudelaire
My Heart” by Frank O’Hara
Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium” by James Wright
Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” by Stéphane Mallarmé
With Mercy for the Greedy” by Anne Sexton
Autre Eventail” by Stéphane Mallarmé
You Who Wronged” by Czeslaw Milosz
Sensibility! O La!” by Theodore Roethke
Purists with Object” by John Ashbery
Late Echo” by John Ashbery
Etiology” by Linda Gregg
Last blues, to be read someday” by Cesar Pavese
Night Song” by Lisel Mueller
Tortures” by Wislawa Szymborska
The Aeolian Harp” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Room of My Life” by Anne Sexton
Constancy to an Ideal Object” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And then we cowards…” by Cesar Pavese
People at Night” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Copious amounts of Leonard Cohen, including “Owning Everything” & “The Only Poem” & “These Heroics” & “I am dying…” etc.
Poets in Romanian (Stanescu, Ana Blandiana, Enescu, so many others)—this would be a longer list