To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books Sept. 28, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/col/keil/1999/09/28/bad_poetry Poetry slam She sent my husband laughable love poems and talked trash about me. He says the affair is finished, but how do I get over it? - - - - - - - - - - - - By Garrison Keillor Dear Mr. Blue, While I was away at graduate school, my husband had an affair with a woman in her mid-40s. While, on one level, this is a comfort to me, since I now have proof that he won't find me unattractive when I am middle-aged, on another level, I want to kill him. They broke up a couple of months before I found out about it, and I never would have known about it at all if I hadn't found the condoms and the 144 e-mails she sent him (which I found by accident! I wasn't snooping!). The e-mails were full of passionate love poetry to him and nasty comments about me. She gave him lots of cards, too, and presents. (I threw the plants off the balcony.) But they broke up, and he wants to stay with me. Should I just get over it, and be glad she wasn't a buxom teeny-bopper who wrote good poetry? Can't Turn the Page Dear Can't, I don't know how you "just get over it," like you'd just get over a scraped knee, but you sound as if you're inclined to keep him around, so that's the right thing to do. Much depends on the quality of his remorse. You might encourage this by hanging the worst of her love poems around the house for a day or two, perhaps enlarged for readability. Let him look at her words in the clear light of day. It'll give you both something to laugh at. Probably the affair was only a sort of bad poem, a forgivable offense, but bad poets do tend to make a habit of it, and you want to nip that sucker right here and now. You need to heal this breach and redeem this marriage. You have to get back to what drew you together in the first place. Your husband behaved badly and you're entitled to be aloof and wounded for months, years if you choose, but it won't help anything. You have a fine sense of humor, obviously, and that's good, because you're in an absurd situation. You need to push this small dark cloud out of your mind and seduce this man and be passionate with him. Discussion can accomplish only so much, and then a wife and husband need to cling to each other naked in the dark and be silent in the presence of the essential mystery. His body and your body are as one, so you have vowed, and in this awesome intimacy, cruelty and betrayal don't count for much. His affair with the poet was a thin impersonation of something real between you and him. Find that and hold onto it. Dear Mr. Blue, My best friend is dating my ex-boyfriend. He was my first love and very hard to get over, and even though I am in a wonderful relationship with another man, and I am trying to be mature about this, it still bothers me. Am I psycho? Aren't there rules about these things? I feel betrayed. It doesn't help that she tiptoes around me all the time, either. What should I do? Chicago Dear Chicago, The rules got rewritten, I guess. But if you ask me, you don't need to be psycho to be bothered by cheesy behavior, and I say forget about being mature: If you feel bad, go ahead and feel bad. But do not under any circumstances let them know that you feel bad. Not in the slightest. Be cool. Keep the feeling of betrayal strictly to yourself and let it dissipate on its own, and if the sight of them exacerbates your misery, put them out of your sight. Revise your Top 10 Friends and slip her back to No. 3 or 4 for a while. And be happy with Mr. New. Dear Mr. Blue, Many years ago I was with a woman I loved very much. Though she and I still cared very much for each other, she ended the relationship. I was hurt, but I moved on. We remained close over the years, and recently we have been spending much time together. I love her and would be more than willing to enter a closer relationship with her; she feels we are too different in temperament. Which is true. Nonetheless, we rarely get on each other's nerves and are great friends and companions. Is there a way I could make her see that what we share makes our differences insignificant? Is it healthy to remain in such a close friendship, knowing it will probably never be what I wish it would? Happy but Hoping Dear H.b.H., I assume you've told her recently how you feel and evidently she has sidestepped your advance. Don't push. Don't try to make her see things your way. You can't argue your way into her heart. Let it be as she wishes. She is probably right. Not getting on each other's nerves is hardly the same as being passionately in love, and she wants more than your companionship, and as her friend, you have to go along with that. No, there is nothing unhealthy about keeping the close friendship, but if it's painful for you, then let the friendship take a vacation for a few months and see how you feel then. Dear Mr. Blue. My 30-year-old daughter is a development exec in Hollywood who just lost her job with a typical Hollywood maniac boss. She's burned out on the exec track and wants to turn to screenwriting. The subtext seems to be that she needs someone to support her while she returns to school and learns the craft. I want to be a good supportive father, but I'm somewhat cynical about the plan, not to mention distressed at the potential financial ramifications. Thoughts? Advice? Good Old Dad Dear G.O.D., If your daughter was a movie exec, she should have collected a few shekels, maybe even some herds of sheep and cattle, with which to pay her rent and keep her in bran muffins while she segues into the screenwriting gig. And even better, she should have picked up a few hunches about how to write a script and, more important, how to sell it. So rather than go to the University of Screenwriting Craft, she should park herself in a bare room with a laptop on her beautiful knees and make art. If she doesn't have the shekels, then she is not allowed to burn out quite yet. You should be a good supportive father and explain that her childhood expired a few years ago. She should get a job and spend her spare time in the bare room and when she's 32 and fabulously successful, she'll thank you. Dear Mr. Blue, The only thing I want to be in life is a writer. And yet I studied teaching and got my license. I am now working as a teacher and am extremely miserable, like the mother of 20 children who need a set of parents each. This job makes me question my existence. I feel like killing myself. I hate it. What job can I get that will use my writing skills that doesn't involve teaching? And tell me: What kind of psychological problem ever led me to think of becoming a teacher? Need Help! Dear Need, Look at what you wrote to me a week ago, and if you still feel that way, quit your teaching job right now. Just walk into the principal's office and do it. Don't wait until you find something else. Leave the classroom just as soon as is gracefully possible. Then find another job. It probably won't be a writing job and may be just something to subsist on. But get a job that you can hold on to for at least six months or a year, while you scope out something better. You've encountered a defeat, but it's nothing final, nothing so disastrous, just an understandable miscalculation, and once you get out of this hellish situation, you'll start to feel better. Dear Mr. Blue, I am a 42-year-old woman who still hasn't decided whether I want a child. I've been with my husband for almost 20 years and he is ambivalent as well, though he says he will support me in my decision. I'm afraid I'm going to miss what life's all about if I don't do it, but then I think if I've put it off this long it must not be for me. Oh, and my doctor wants me to go on Zoloft for depression now, which means putting off the decision for six months (making conception more unlikely). I obsess about this; I've thought about it for years and am now seeing a counselor. What do you think? Ambivalent Dear Ambivalent, It isn't a good idea to conceive and produce a baby as an experiment, to see if it's what you want, to see if this is what you're missing in life. Parenthood is a long step into the dark under the best of circumstances. It is a joyful catastrophe, and one shouldn't enter it except with prayerful confidence. If, after 20 years with one man, you're still not sure whether you want to have a child with him, then your mind is trying to tell your heart no. Of course I could be all wrong about this. Dear Mr. Blue, My boyfriend and I broke up over the weekend. It was really his idea. We had a long discussion about our future. I'm 30 and he's 25. He's not looking to get married till he is 30, and I can't wait five years. So it was decided to part ways. He still wants to remain friends, and I'm wondering how long I should wait before we start doing things together. I think he wanted to spend as much time together as before. That would be too difficult for me, plus there is the risk of getting back together, which I don't want. What do you suggest? Picking Up the Pieces Dear P.P., This is the calmest breakup I've ever heard of. The ones I know about all involved long letters, buckets of tears, the slamming of doors, shouting up stairways, some breakage of china and glassware, phone calls from mutual friends, long lonely walks late at night, bouts of grim remorse and listening to Chopin nocturnes over and over. You broke up with this guy in the same spirit as one might return a raincoat to Nordstrom's or cancel a meeting. You compared long-range plans and noted the discrepancy and voided the agreement. Every breakup should be so civil as this. I think you can start doing things with him whenever you like and do whatever you like whenever you like to do it. But don't get back together. Wait until someone comes along who is more than a raincoat, someone who, if you ever had to break up with him, your heart would break and you'd sit alone in the dark drinking bourbon and listening to Billie Holiday. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm a graduate student and a teacher. I love my work. Still, I've always seen myself as a novelist as well. Several times a week, I write fiction, but as yet it's shapeless. Perhaps this is because I'm afraid I'd have to give up one dream to have the other. I want the Ph.D. and the novel too. Is it possible, or am I about to do a shallow dive into a bucket of hubris? P.S. I am unmarried and childless, so I wouldn't be bothering anyone but myself. Rewriter Dear Rewriter, Don't give up the ship. Perhaps the novel is still in the Rummaging & Discovery stage and you haven't come to the real writing yet. I haven't any idea what you're trying to write, so pardon me if I offer a slight suggestion. Only a suggestion, based on nothing. A common problem of writers starting out is overswinging, trying to hit a home run and impress their old English teacher, Miss Postlethwaite, with a sensitive and luminous novel about a young woman coming of age and discovering her talent as a writer. This is not necessarily a novel we readers look forward to reading. If you're burning the midnight oil to write this novel, why not make it a novel that is amusing to write and that is constructed on a strong scaffold of a plot and that is meant to entertain us? Shapelessness may be a sign that you're trying too hard. (Of course I don't know how long you've been at this, either.) It's only a suggestion, offered by a man who recalls his early unpublishable novels only too well. Dear Mr. Blue, I am looking for a woman who's really exceptional: smart, funny, good-looking, horny, loyal and strong. The women I've met so far aren't even close, but is it wrong to date them anyway, knowing there's no long-term future? Should I never go out with a woman if I think she's not "the one"? I don't want to "settle" for someone, but I also don't want to waste my time looking for perfection if it doesn't exist. Looking Dear Looking, The exceptional women you seek are here in Minnesota. Smart, funny, good-looking, horny, loyal, strong -- that, plus blond, describes them to a T. They're all over the place; any man who could walk four blocks down Nicollet Avenue without falling in love with at least three women is either clinically depressed, or gay, or blind. Minnesota produces tall sinewy women who can paddle a canoe, handle an ax, dance the tango, manage money, write a paper on "Hamlet" and at the end of the day do things that make a man faint from ecstasy. If you can settle in Minnesota for a few months, you won't have to settle for anything less than perfection. If you're looking somewhere else, you're probably wasting your time. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm a young writer with a pretty good gig at an alternative newsweekly (I also freelance for a number of larger publications), but I've got to the point where I don't trust my editor with my work. I know writers hate editors -- the inverse probably applies in some sense as well -- but I'm not sure what to do here. The problem is confounded by the fact that I'm in a great relationship and don't want to leave the city where I live, even if there are few publishing outlets for writers here. Your wisdom is appreciated. Stuck Dear Stuck, This weekly paper is not the apex and capstone of your career; it's only one stop on your trek, and what it has to offer you is Experience, a precious commodity, including the experience of suffering under a dense editor. Don't worry about your work. You'll do better work further along, and then work even better than that. Use your time well and venture into new realms and subjects, soak up new information, read widely, look at what you don't know, practice curiosity, learn the art of rewriting, study Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style" and deal with this editor. You can learn more from your opponents than from your allies. Dear Mr. Blue, I had a wonderful date two weeks ago with a man I really like. There wasn't a second date. I ran into him a few times (we work at the same place) and he asked me out but didn't follow through. (He did e-mail me telling me his phone lines were down and he was sorry we didn't connect.) Last week I saw him a few times in passing, and he seemed happy to see me. I e-mailed him to say hello, but haven't had a response. What makes men run away like this? (The opportunity presented itself to sleep with him that first date, and I declined because I wasn't ready to take that step. Could that have turned him off?) Baffled in Bel Air Dear Baffled, What does that mean, "the opportunity presented itself to sleep with him"? A bed rose up from the earth, an owl brought a pair of jammies? I take it he asked you to have sex and you said no. Good for you. Probably he's embarrassed about hitting on you like that. He's like a guy who took a huge swing with his trusty No. 3 wood and missed the ball and his hair fell off. Let him work out his embarrassment by himself. Don't e-mail him again, and don't be quite so friendly the next time you see him. The fact that he wanted to sleep with you doesn't mean he likes you. It doesn't mean anything, really. Remember the old saying, dear: Women are looking for a reason to make love, men are looking for a place. If he wants to see you again, he'll ask you, and then you can decide how you feel. Dear Mr. Blue, For two and a half years, I was seeing a beautiful, incredibly special woman. She was crazy about me. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. During this time, I did little to move forward in my life from my marriage that ended before I met her, and now she's left me because she doesn't believe she is the most important thing in my life. I'm devastated and can now see clearly what I have been doing to myself and to us. How do I convince her that I've seen the light and I'm the man to make her happy? Sleepless in Seattle Dear Sleepless, Start out by assuming she's right, that she wasn't that important to you, that you were tossing and languishing over the failed marriage, you were sleepwalking. You say you've seen the light, but take a longer look at yourself. Take some time to think clearly about the past few years. Try to put it down on paper, not as a form of pleading for love but simply to clarify. Describe in detail what you did and what happened to you. Take your time. Treat the emotional stuff as clearly and simply as you can, and remember: You're writing this for yourself, so skip the special effects. Do this with care, as a job, and when you're finished with it, put it aside for a while. Meanwhile, if she is willing to see you, start your courtship over and proceed slowly. Flowers, music, long walks, champagne and oysters. Or, in Seattle, I guess it's champagne and clams. But don't come to her in devastation; come to her with some resolution of going forward. Put the past two and a half years down on paper and then put it in a box. And then take her out dancing. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm recently married to a wonderful man who is hopelessly addicted to cigarettes. We're talking first thing in the morning, last thing at night and all times in between. He's tried to quit several times with nicotine gum, but it never lasts long. He says he wishes he could stop and is ashamed of the habit, but he doesn't seem motivated to make a concerted effort. The reason it bothers me so much is that I want us to have a long and healthy life together. We're young, and it tears me up to hear him wheezing like an accordion in bed at night. How can I help him to quit without being a nag? North Carolina Bride Dear Bride, You can help by reading up on the effects of secondary smoke: It's terribly harmful to you, the smoker's wife, and you shouldn't accept having to breathe it. That's not nagging, that's common sense. It's his business if he wants to smoke; it's your business if he smokes in the room with you. Make smoking a little less convenient for him, and that will facilitate his decision to stop. As for stopping, it is far from hopeless: It can't be done by the nicotine gum -- that is only a prop -- but when he gets tired of feeling bad and worrying about emphysema, he can stop. When he's ready to stop, have him write to me and I'll tell him how. Dear Mr. Blue, I am a journalist who enjoys writing fiction on the side. My problem is that I'm addicted to praise. I am incapable of thinking I did a good job unless somebody tells me so. And I can be sent into a day-long funk by a little criticism. How does a person thicken his skin and learn to be happy with what he produces regardless of what anyone says? Addicted Dear Addicted, Whenever you feel blue, go into a room where nobody can hear you and give a brief speech accepting the Pulitzer Prize (either for fiction or journalism, or both), and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, my heart is full today," and go on to thank your teachers, your parents, your editors, your readers, your mentors, your chiropractor, proctologist, dental hygienist, and stop and listen to the roar of the audience leaping to its feet to give you the standing O, and shake hands with the invisible man next to you and accept the trophy and smile for the photographers. And then wipe away your tears and go back to your desk. This actually works. Fake praise and real praise are exactly the same and weigh the same and smell the same: It's all imaginary. I've given myself the Pulitzer Prize hundreds of times. If I ever got the real one, it'd be a huge letdown. salon.com | Sept. 28, 1999