The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

AMY GERSTLER

Ø Amy Gerstler 500 The Day Has Come When My Mother The day has come when my mother no longer knows me. It comes on a day of dying paperwhites,1 crumpled like words from a typewriter. Weightless, they scatter, generous as sighs, across the table, the patio, where the attendant wheels her, leaning into the dead weight of her, through so many blossoms it actually looks like snow. 2007 AMY GERSTLER b. 1956 A leading los angeles postmodernist, amy gerstler writes witty yet unsettling accounts of contemporary emotional life. Her poems flash with the glamour of the popular culture texts they often parody. Below the seductive surface , however, the reader comes into contact with some of the less attractive components of the postmodern world, including alienation, loneliness, and frustrated desire. Like other poets in the New York school and the Language poetry movement, both of which have influenced her, Gerstler produces poems that are funny and racy. Within their hip style, they generate profound social and psychological insights. Born in San Diego, Amy Gerstler grew up in a family that was oriented toward the performing arts, especially musical comedy. After receiving a B.A. in psychology at Pitzer College in 1978, she transitioned into the poetry and visual 1. Paperwhites are daffodil bulbs with brilliant white flowers noted for their fragrance. Native to both Asia and Europe, they include the Chinese Sacred Lily among their varieties. Once they blossom, they do not bloom again. 501 Amy Gerstler Ø arts scenes in Los Angeles. Since the 1980s she has produced avant-garde poems and prose poems as well as art installations and art criticism. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the short-story writer Benjamin Weissman, and teaches at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Gerstler has spoken of being influenced by comic books, the thesaurus, recipes , and old science textbooks “where people try to explain the world, but they explain it wrong.” Her poems subversively plumb the bottomless gulfs just below the seemingly placid surface of our culture: the haunting presences of separation , loss, and grief, the things that “are dark, in the head.” As Amy Moorman Robbins was first to note, Gerstler also provides vivid “portrayals of women” and of homophobia, childhood sexuality, and hierarchically gendered power relations . Although Gerstler’s work evokes the rhythms of Los Angeles domestic life and cultural productions, the poet downplays the impact that location makes. She doesn’t see “much difference between one place or the other” except that in Los Angeles the scenes are more spread out, providing a sense of “privacy” in which to do one’s work. Sven Birkerts has commented that Gerstler’s poems capture “the surrealism of everyday life.” Laurence Goldstein has similarly observed that the poet internalizes the abundance of what she sees “and converts it to autonomous images fit for enumeration as an imaginary city of words.” Gerstler spins popular culture , high art, folklore, science, and objects and events personally encountered into a textual world that is by turns enjoyable and disturbing. She combines a gift for insight with a love of verbal experiment and an irreverent spirit. further reading Rise B. Axelrod and Steven Gould Axelrod. “Amy Gerstler’s Rhetoric of Marriage.” Twentieth Century Literature 50.1 (Spring 2004): 88–105. Sven Birkerts. “Prose Poetry.” Parnassus 15 (1989): 163–84. Amy Gerstler. Bitter Angel. 1990. Reprint. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Press, 1997. — — — —. Dearest Creature. New York: Penguin, 2009. — — — —. Medicine. New York: Penguin, 2000. — — — —. “What is American about American Poetry?” Poetry Society of America website, www .poetrysociety.org/gerstler.html. Laurence Goldstein. “Looking for Authenticity in Los Angeles.” Michigan Quarterly Review 30 (1991): 717–31. “Ignition Magazine Interviews Amy Gerstler.” Ignition 1 (2000): 1–8. Amy Moorman Robbins. “Amy Gerstler.” In Contemporary American Women Poets: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. Catherine Cucinella. 138–41. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Ø Amy Gerstler 502 1. That is, as a motherless child, the speaker had no one to guide her into the functions of female modesty central to American cultural ideology. 2. Feeding, like an animal nibbling on grass; also rubbing, like a sharp object scratching the skin. I Fall to Pieces What does a kiss mean in our kind of relationship? A truce of lips? That though we’re both animals, you won’t bite? After necking in the cemetery, I felt scattered as that married couple’s ashes. You read...