Monsters: A Reckoning by Croggon Alison

Author:Croggon, Alison [Croggon, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS015000, BIO026000, SOC032000, Sociology, Biography, History, POL045000, SOC010000
ISBN: 9781925713398
Amazon: 1925713393
Goodreads: 56226909
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2021-03-02T08:00:00+00:00

The second choice came a year later. When I accidentally fell pregnant to the handsome Greek man, I decided to have the baby.

I mostly don’t remember the act of writing, but I remember one poem: ‘This is the Stone’, which was the title poem of my first book (after my first title, Quickening, was refused because of another collection that came out the same year). I wrote it after watching a documentary about Frida Kahlo. It was the first time I had heard of her. Her paintings hit me with the force of revelation.

it’s when you want to shrug it all off:

the gross pap of warm anaesthetised brain

hotels ringing with stale tongues

the bland translations of headlines

walls everywhere

when money’s sensual brutality

chats warmly in your veins

when your possessions assert their tyranny

mocking you from corners

where is the moon’s still wash

over uncluttered landscapes?

where are your lovers’ mouths

which stopped your mouth so neatly?

in this dreamless city you put them away

now you turn to a window

which mimics you in ice

your face a marble of loss

your hair a curtain of dust:

this is the stone you work on

I had never written anything directly autobiographical before; almost all my poems were fictions, personas, masks, displacements. To write directly of myself seemed like the greatest self-indulgence; there was nothing interesting in me to write about. But Kahlo used herself as her subject matter, pitilessly, magnificently. I thought that maybe I could do the same thing, and it mightn’t be bad art: it could be blazing, magnificent, truthful. It was the first time I sensed that there might be a tradition in which I might not be a misfit, wrongsexed: a tradition that permitted me.

When I wrote this poem, I was sitting on the floor late at night in my rented apartment with my new couch and my fashionable clothes and my bad housekeeping. I felt purely exhilarated, as if finally I was touching the edges of something that I had been looking for my whole life.

I didn’t include this poem in my New and Selected: I think it struck me as too portentous. But it mattered then as a psychic placing of myself where I was, lost among the rags of my bourgeois self, unhappy, dreamless, stopped, anaesthetised. A statement of intent. A beginning.

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