Gimme Shelter

Too Much Too Often

Sometimes here at DSM our brains get so tired from being lit savvy that we have to work to avoid an intellectual hangover, if you will.  You know — take a minute, drink some water, regulate that literature drug. But, don’t you know, some writers aren’t like that! In fact, there are about fifteen noteworthy, excessive glass-raising writers who can endure intelligence and alcohol. For example, John Cheever: “a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in [his] own defensive illusions that [he has] invented a manic-depressive wife and battled extreme alcoholism.”

Fun stuff!

This all makes sense to Erica Jong, who says, “Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more.”

If tobacco is your writerly savory, Scotland’s greatest poet wants to share some thoughts on the poetic glamor of filling your lungs with tar.

One Cigarette

by Edwin Morgan

No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker’s tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass
I’ll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.

Video: Edwin Morgan’s Poems

And now for some real champagne popping news!

This just in: poets making a living by selling poetry. That’s right, and here’s how it works: You open a poetry-specific book store in Seattle, say fifteen years ago. You call it Open Books and engage the community. Then you get a well-known Seattle Times writer to quote you saying things like: People love “the aesthetics, the tactility,”  when it comes to reading a book of poems. “When you touch the page you know the words have been pressed into the paper.”

And then you drink until you get hungover, which is exactly what we’d do.

– Lori Huskey