Love Letters

TO THE CHARNEL GROUND
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: STACY SZYMASZEK: AUGUST 2008

I had to look up the word "Charnel" (spelled "charnal" by the author of the letter). My quick aural interpretation was carnal, carnage, charred - and in fact "charnel" is a repository for or field of bones of the dead. Unlike dramatic metaphors evoked in the love letter genre, the author of this particular letter actually seems to literally be thanking the object of affection for accompanying her/him to "the charnel ground" but follows with a series of disjunctive images that make this 2-line missive unsettling, poetic. It reminded me of Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"! It's not stylistically typical of the letters that follow but I think the connection between love and death (our two big fear factors) serves as a good psychological bass line which often rises up to contort the house and derange the senses.

I was really surprised by the presence of "misspellings" in these letters. Some of them feel like typos or perhaps ESL renderings but most of them give me the sense that they erupted from human desire - not for the other - but for LANGUAGE, banging up against a limitation (words can't express)and desperately wanting an appropriate FORM for the power of their feeling/being: "mutual jooy", " home baby", "letsgorightnow" and assigning the digit "10000000000000000000000" to represent the magnitude of love are some examples. Formally a lot of the letters actually start to use line breaks which is of course what poets use to achieve tension, nuance and all sorts of effects on the open field of the page. Unusual syntax abounds. These are love letters and not poems and I don't have to compare them to poems to appreciate them but I do think it's a salient feature that in the love letter there seems to be a thrust to overturn normal speech patterns to get to the censored or unspeakable that are just as much a part of daily life.

I especially liked the letters written by teenagers. They made me laugh from the safe distance of Class of 87! They felt absurd with almost a surprising knowing quality - like "this is practice"- to make the certain angst of the emotional lives of teens more interesting. I have penned many love letters. It's something I associate with my youth, when I thought pleasure and happiness were synonymous. I don't recall writing a love letter as a happy occasion, even when I wasn't overtly expressing conflict, feelings of desperation/insecurity, fear of loss. Indeed most of these letters seem to erupt from distance and conflict, intent on lessening the space between self and other. When you set up a home with your other as I have the love letter seems a thing of the past. In fact, (is it pleasure or happiness) I like when we bicker and 10 minutes later it's a whole new emotional day. This mobility through rough spots, vs. fits and spasms is one of the graces of long term relationship. In my experience. And I do find myself thankful that I have someone to go to the charnel ground with me.

Stacy Szymaszek
Brooklyn
21 August 08


Stacy Szymaszek is a poet from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She currently lives in New York, where she works as the Artistic Director at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. Chapbooks include Mutual Aid (gong, 2004), Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005) and There Were Hostilities (release, 2005). She is the author of Emptied of All Ships and the forthcoming Hyperglossia (both with Litmus Press). She is the editor of Gam, coeditor of Instance Press, and was one of the editors of the "Queering Language" issue of EOAGH. A new work, Stacy S: Autoportraits, featuring her self-portraits with accompanying texts by Renee Gladman, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Anne Tardos, David Gatten and others is just out on OMG Press.