The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Two): Diana Goetsch [by Angela Ball]

YOU COULD

I stood in the middle of my kitchen eating butter.

It was 11 a.m. on an overcast morning

I was wearing—well, let’s not worry about

what I was wearing. I don’t make a habit of this—

I’d never done it before. It wasn’t a whole stick,

though a good half inch. Popped it in

and let it melt into the flesh under my tongue,

the place where you’d insert nitro-glycerin,

if that’s what you needed. I won’t describe

the taste—you’ll have to try it for yourself.

Perhaps when you’re thinking about goals,

that would be a good time to let some

butter have a ride on your tongue,

or stick a thumb in a bowl of icing,

scarf a pie with no hands, like a wolf—

whatever pulls you in from, or shoves you out on the ledge

you might need to come in from, or go out on.

You don’t have to climb Mount Everest,

unless you find yourself in front of it

and can’t come away. Unless something’s

calling you to do something your friends

wouldn’t understand in a million years.

I don’t understand butter. I know it

comes from cows, who have given so much

for so long. But it’s a person I picture,

the first to try it. Others in the tribe

discarded the floating globules, but this one

opted to taste the world, the same world

that has us so worried and confused.

You could do it, and afterwards write it down:

Today was overcast. I put on a full slip, just because.

Oh and I ate butter—incredible!

–Diana Goetsch

Poems come out of nowhere and then you see what went into them. “You Could” is a carpe diem/anti-bucket list type poem. I knew a bucketlister whose goal was to see a baseball game in every major league stadium. This same person also said he wanted to die by age 60—which actually makes sense because been-there-done-that-ism is more about dying (“kicking the bucket”) than living. “You Could” was also influenced by Nazim Hikmet’s great poem, “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison,” which recommends against certain activities (“to think of roses and gardens inside is bad”) in favor of others (“to think of seas and mountains is good”) in order to stay truly alive. Hikmet’s rating system may be cryptic to some, though the incarcerated kids I used to teach had no problems relating to the poem. “You Could” also elevates some experiences (butter tasting) over others (mountain climbing). And yet it ends with a journal entry, which makes every life look like a bucket list. –Diana Goetsch

Diana Goetsch is the author of several poetry collections, including Nameless Boy (Orchises, 2015) and In America (Rattle 2017), and also the memoir This Body I Wore (FSG, 2022), which was pronounced “achingly beautiful” by The New York Times Book Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She used to teach at Stuyvesant High School. Her website is www.dianagoetsch.com

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Two): Diana Goetsch

In her important “You Could,” Diana Goetsch treats us to the miraculous ordinary, like Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch when they thrill at “the park full of dancers and their tights and shoes / in little bags . . .” or at staring into, as into a musical telescope, “a bottle of sparkling pop.” Like both O’Hara’s and Koch’s work, “You Could” instructs by delighting.

The poem begins with a bald announcement of the kind a Noir narrator might make, complete with place, time, and weather: “I stood in the middle of my kitchen eating butter.” The speaker begins to tell what she was wearing, then rejects this as unimportant, launching instead into rationalization: it’s something she doesn’t do often and “wasn’t a whole stick / though a good half inch.” The butter dissolves into, in disconcerting coincidence, “the place you’d insert nitro-glycerin, / if that’s what you needed.” The poet declines to usurp our experience of butter by detailing her own encounter.

The poem’s second stanza introduces goals only to supply anarchic ones sure to be rejected by America’s ultra-serious dieters and exercisers, including “scarf a pie with no hands, like a wolf.” There’s no call to go all death-defying—“You don’t have to climb Mount Everest, / unless you find yourself in front of it / and can’t come away.” It broaches matters mysterious and serious, though mentioned casually: “Unless something’s calling you to do something / that your friends wouldn’t understand in a million years.” Something, perhaps, like changing your métier, your name, or your sex, as eels do going to or from the sea?

Then the poem makes a strange and wonderful pronouncement: “I don’t understand butter.” Normally, butter does not offer itself to our understanding, not even on cooking shows that display its behavior as an ingredient, but tell us nothing of its inner life, its thisness. After a nod to the all-important cow, the poet moves to what truly interests her, the discoverer of butter—the explorer who, despite unfamiliarity “opted to taste the world, the same world / that has us so worried and confused.” The poem dares us to dare—to assume an MO arcane merely because so few have followed it—among them Frank O’Hara, who in in his poem “Autobiographia Literaria” transforms from reject to poet:

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

“You Could” ends by relating the author’s journal entry for the day as possible model, generous example, happily including the detail withheld at the start, what she is wearing:

You could do it, and afterwards write it down:

Today was overcast. I put on a full slip, just because.

Oh and I ate butter—incredible!

The slip here, a garment now sadly in neglect, is the same one worn by the young Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, and by the character Alison in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; garment whose very mention (as “shift”) provoked riots during the run of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 Dublin. In putting it on, the poet puts on its feminine power, its fierce delicacy “just because”—the very reason we dare to indulge our dangerous and life-affirming impulses, the reason we enter an irresistible poem like Diana Goetsch’s “You Could” not knowing who we might be when we leave.

–Angela Ball

Related Stories

Related Posts