hu cares | louise

On the first day of class Louise declared that she did not have email, and that we were to take out a writing implement and write down her telephone number in case we needed anything from her. She made no effort to be welcoming, to seem approachable or relatable. In other seminars, professors went out of their way to connect with us, playing pop songs before class or throwing a meme into their slide decks. One of my favorite professors invited us to his house for an end-of-semester potluck; another brought in a lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair*. Louise would never. She remained distant, aloof. Even when she liked something we’d written, she never lingered on her praise.

Each week after class, my friend J and I would replay her most biting lines from the workshop. I delighted in her unflinching directness. With years of distance from those days, I see now it wasn’t just delight, but also terror. In my mind’s eye she wears all black; she made no particular effort to smile. Here was a woman who was very good at what she did, and didn’t soften herself or what she thought. No aww shucks, no hemming and hawing over delivering the truth: if this line was boring, she said so. She was perhaps the first truly self-possessed woman I’d ever met. The southern women I’d grown up around were fiery, sure, but to survive, they were also adept at putting people at ease. Bless your heart, these women would say, smiling through their teeth. The moms and teachers and coaches I knew had big hair and wore Lily Pulitzer to church; they smelled nice and they never discussed politics in mixed company. 

It was in this environment that I first found Louise’s poems. Emo was having its moment, and I was doing the whole teenage rebellion thing, so I loved the austerity of her writing, the bitterness: “I hate it; I hate as I hate sex.” She knew how to deliver a true burn with humor and grace: “One thing I’ve always hated / about you: I hate that you refuse to have people at the house. Flaubert / had more friends and Flaubert / was a recluse.” Here was an adult woman writing plainly about deep, dark wells of unresolved emotion, even regret – a far cry from the flowery pastorals we read in AP English, or Billy Collins stuff on dogs (no shade to Collins; I love his work, too, but the tone couldn’t be more different). Lean into the gloom, Louise’s poems encouraged me; perhaps it means something.

I wanted so badly to impress her, to cultivate a voice that appealed to her. When I think about Louise I think about inadequacy, nerves. Her taste was opaque to me, and I could never quite figure it out. I regarded her as a fickle god, to whom we’d bring our little offerings to see what pleased her. I agonized over the first few poems I wrote for that class. I experimented with my writing, not for myself but for her: I tried to take whatever big feeling I was having and turn that into some cryptic phrase, or insert a detail that sounded just a little mysterious. With each poem, I tried contorting my words to sound like someone else, until I no longer knew who I was or what I was writing about. Occasionally she’d bracket and draw a star beside a stanza she liked along with a single-word compliment, but mostly she’d cross out the words and phrases that didn’t work. By the fourth week of class, I had given up. My friend M had bought an epic five-chamber bong he’d named Slayer of the Oceans, and it was only after helping him christen it one afternoon that I remembered I had to write and print out twelve copies of a poem by 8pm. 

A still-life from my dorm room during this era.

At workshop the next day, Louise finally sung my praises. This was a new side of me, she said, something raw — a breakthrough. And in a way, I guess she was right. Still, I felt like I’d cheated somehow; I’d only accidentally created something she liked. When I’ve told this story over the years, I compare it to an episode of the cartoon Doug, which I obviously rewatched as research for this essay. Doug is making a mediocre painting in art class when his dog Porkchop starts chasing a racoon. The two animals knock over his easel, and run across the backside of his canvas with paint on their paws. Doug’s art teacher sees only the pawprint creation and declares Doug brilliant; his work is exhibited at the local art museum. He feels like a fraud, and at the opening, he confesses what really happened. But that’s not what I did – I just kept writing poems with entheogenic inspiration. They weren’t always a hit, but Louise seemed to like them enough to admit me to her “advanced” seminar the next year. 

It’s been many years since. I don’t write many poems these days, but when I do, I still feel Louise’s pull. I always think of her when the cherry trees begin to bloom because of this gorgeous closing stanza in Vita Nova: 

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time   

not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet   

it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

When I was younger, I read the poem as a paean to spring, a celebration of things renewed. I see its darker edges now — how bittersweet memory can be — and it makes that celebration even more of a triumph. How amazing it is that we return again and again, even in the face of death?

That has more meaning to me this year than ever. This is the first spring since my dog died, and I almost dread the blossoming of the cherry in our backyard because she won’t be here to lay under it. It’s also the world’s first spring without Louise; she died last October. In her obituary in the Times, there’s a quote from a 2009 interview she did with the Academy of American Poets:

When I’m told I have a large readership, I think, ‘Oh, great, I’m going to turn out to be Longfellow’ — someone easy to understand, easy to like, the kind of diluted experience available to many. And I don’t want to be Longfellow. Sorry, Henry, but I don’t.’

This is the spirit of Louise that I am still so drawn to. Asserting the space to be obtuse and cryptic. Prizing complexity. Not being for everyone. 

*Only years later did I learn that the provenance of this Dickinson hair was actually quite contentious. I didn’t know much at age 20, but even then, I thought it was a weird flex.

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Unsolicited recommendations

• Chappell Roan’s Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess. Forgive me for recycling a post I made on Threads but I have like six followers there and I am convinced it is a Good Tweet: Kesha walked so Chappell Roan could run. It has all the camp of Dinosaur but so much more depth. (Dan Nigro, who worked on Olivia Rodrigo’s records, is also Roan’s producer, and in fact the whole reason he started his own label.)

• Pre-order Beth Rodden’s memoir A Light Through the Cracks. Climbers will delight in the backstory behind some of her toughest sends and anyone who’s ever lived through an eating disorder or PTSD will recognize Rodden’s struggles.

• Barley lattes. The barista across the street from the coworking space I’ve been going to makes them and yes I am aware I sound insufferable but the barley syrup adds a bit of nuttiness and depth without being too sweet. If you’re in Seattle, go to Full Tank (inside Project 9 Brewing) and check ‘em out.

• Making a little list on Google Maps of your favorite local establishments or places you want to try. I have an awful memory for places in town that I like, and routinely forget about places for months on end. I recently put an hour or so into marking them on Gmaps and it’s already paying off: earlier today, when a friend suggested we grab dinner before an event next week, I looked at the map and saw that a place we’ve gone together before is just a few blocks away. Thanks to past Jane I had one fewer decision to make!

• 646_847_8861 on Instagram. If you type the URL into your browser it doesn’t work, but the deal is that you just text photos to this number and they post your photos. (It appears to have a real person on the other end; I have texted with them.) It has a few thousand followers and follows no one. I am charmed by its simplicity and how it’s managed to glitch the app.

Lately

• I was on a panel about psychedelics for the Boston University’s College of Communication and SciCommers’ in conjunction with the Dana Foundation. The video’s up on YouTube.

• For The Microdose, I interviewed Dave Franco — not the actor, but a former Chicago cop who’s now advocating for drug reform. Also he was part of Dennis Rodman’s security detail from 1996-1998? (Didn’t ask him about that one, but now I wish I had.)

• Speaking of The Microdose, we’ve quietly added a new section called Spotlight, where we’ll dive deeper into specific ideas and topics in psychedelics. Look for more stories there in coming months.