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(note from jmp - i think i have found another hero] Self-Reflection In this poem, I promise, you will learn everything I know about myself. Despite the fact I get it wrong, I've been looking in the mirror my whole life. I think I see myself, but as you know from your own experience, that's rarely the case. How ridiculous that we spend so long gazing at the unattainable, fooling ourselves with our own faulty facts, our faces flying toward us exactly backwards. We could spend that time dancing or reading out loud. We could make love more often and try to keep our minds from wandering. After all of these years I can't even pick myself out in the class photograph. But I can recognize your face anywhere. It could be that, actually, objectivity is underrated and love its greatest example. This relegates relativity to twentieth-century egotism, nothing more than a medieval scheme to place the earth at the center once again. Just a theory. And there are others. For example, I have believed that growing a good tomato is as important as writing a poem. For example, I have believed in the open exchange of ideas. I have believed we are not the same and this is the greatest liberation. Cathryn Hankla from her book Texas School Book Depository Copyright 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000 by Cathryn Hankla. All rights reserved. Cathryn Hankla, professor of English at Hollins University, is the author of three previous collections of poetry—Phenomena, Afterimages, and Negative History—a collection of short stories, and the novel A Blue Moon in Poorwater. She is poetry editor for the Hollins Critic. About Texas School Book Depository: Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A shadow narrative moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who survives a difficult childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of adult life and whose journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller realization of her place in the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, allusions to literary, spiritual, artistic, and political figures, local and familial lore—all become ready touchstones for the revelation of feeling and reevaluations of identity and the nature of freedom. While recognizing the danger in exploration, Hankla takes pleasure in questioning the status quo and takes issue with those who sidestep emotional or intellectual adversities by affecting apathy, as when she attempts to find the center in "Turn Something Inside Out": "Would I discover you there, poised like a prayer to be answered? And if you were a prayer, how would I find the center? If at the center there were a fear, like a stitch left in an incision, how would I know how it began unless you told me, unless you held me, upside down, and shook until you faked nothing, neither interest nor passion nor forever." In the title poem, the Louvre's huge cache is searched, not for the famed Mona Lisa or Egyptian antiquities, but in a metaphorical quest for something now forever lost—a nation's collective naïveté, destroyed with Kennedy's assassination from the gunman's nest in what was then the Texas School Book Depository. In "Self-Reflection" the critical irony turns inward, amplifying the usual solipsistic despair—not even the self can be known: "Despite the fact that I get it wrong, I've been looking in the mirror my whole life. I think I see myself, but as you know from your own experience, that's rarely the case." Yet the poem ends by offering hope, in a series of comical but potent "theories": "For example, I have believed that growing a good tomato is as important as writing a poem. For example, I have believed in the open exchange of ideas. I have believed we are not the same and this is the greatest liberation." Intimate and unusual, amusing and moving, Texas School Book Depositor! y is a truly wondrous offering. "From the strikingly smart 'God Attack' to the wryly speculative 'Turn Something Inside Out,' wherein the speaker notes that penetrating to the core of things 'would be easier if I were you, carefully promising nothing, delivering the same,' this collection invites us to see a self as a 'whole thing' that reveals itself only as it is turned inside out through the agency of art.... Toughened, not jaded, Hankla promises much and delivers." — Kelly Cherry Louisiana State University Press Baton Rouge, LA 70803 http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/ Poetry Daily http://www.poems.com/ janet paterson, an akinetic rigid subtype parkie 53 now /44 dx cd / 43 onset cd /41 dx pd / 37 onset pd TEL: 613 256 8340 SMAIL: POBox 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada EMAIL: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/