Read Online Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online Page A

the equivalent is at the moment. Film-making, he’d guess, for those with intellectual pretensions. For those without, it’s playing the drums in a group, a group with a disgusting name such as Animal Fats or The Living Snot, if his twenty-seven-year-old son is any indication. Richard can’t keep close tabs though, because the son lives with Richard’s ex-wife. (Still! At his age! Why doesn’t he get a room, an apartment, a job, Richard finds himself thinking, sourly enough. He understands, now, his own father’s irritation with the black turtlenecks he used to wear, his scruffy attempts at a beard, his declamations, over the obligatory Sunday-dinner meat and potatoes, of “The Waste Land,” and, later and even more effectively, of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” But at least he’d been interested in
meaning
, he tells himself. Or words. At least he’d been interested in words.)
    He’d been good with words, then. He’d had several of his poems published in the university literary magazine, and in two little magazines, one of them not mimeographed. Seeing these poems in print, with his name underneath – he used initials, like T. S. Eliot, to make himself sound older – had given him more satisfaction than he’d ever got out of anything before. But he’d made the mistake of showing one of these magazines to his father, who was lower-middle-management with the Post Office. This had rated nothing more than a frown and a grunt, but as he was going down the walk with his bag of freshly washed laundry, on his way back to his rented room, he’d heard his old man reading one of his free-verse anti-sonnetsout loud to his mother, sputtering with mirth, punctuated by his mother’s disapproving, predictable voice: “Now John! Don’t be so hard on him!”
    The anti-sonnet was about Mary Jo, a chunky, practical girl with an off-blonde pageboy who worked at the library, and with whom Richard was almost having an affair.
“I sink into your eyes,”
his father roared. “Old swamp-eyes! Cripes, what’s he gonna do when he gets down as far as the tits?”
    And his mother, acting her part in their ancient conspiracy: “Now John! Really! Language!”
    Richard told himself severely that he didn’t care. His father never read anything but the
Reader’s Digest
and bad paperback novels about the war, so what did he know?
    By that particular Tuesday Richard had given up free verse. It was too easy. He wanted something with more rigour, more structure; something, he admits to himself now, that not everybody else could do.
    He’d read his own stuff during the first set of the evening, a group of five sestinas followed by a villanelle. His poems were elegant, intricate; he was pleased with them. The espresso machine went off during the last one – he was beginning to suspect Max of sabotage – but several people said “Shhh.” When he’d finished there was polite applause. Richard sat back down in his corner, surreptitiously scratching his neck. The black turtleneck was giving him a rash. As his mother never ceased telling anyone who might be interested, he had a delicate skin.
    After him there was a straw-haired older woman poet from the West Coast who read a long poem in which the wind was described as blowing up between her thighs. There were breezy disclosures in this poem, offhand four-letter words; nothing you wouldn’t find in Allen Ginsberg, but Richard caught himself blushing. After her reading, this woman came over and sat down beside Richard. Shesqueezed his arm and whispered, “Your poems were nice.” Then, staring him straight in the eye, she hitched her skirt up over her thighs. This was hidden from the rest of the room by the checked tablecloth and by the general smoky gloom. But it was a clear invitation. She was daring him to take a peek at whatever moth-eaten horror she had tucked away in there.
    Richard found himself becoming coldly angry. He was supposed to salivate, jump her on the stairway like some