Poem: Erica Jong, "Nursing You"
Categories: news, National, Hope, History, Metaphysical, love, Writing, Art
Nursing You
On the first night
of the full moon,
the primeval sack of ocean
broke,
& I gave birth to you
little woman,
little carrot top,
little turned-up nose,
pushing you out of myself
as my mother
pushed
me out of herself,
as her mother did,
& her mother's mother before her,
all of us born
of woman.
I am the second daughter
of a second daughter
of a second daughter,
but you shall be the first.
You shall see the phrase
"second sex"
only in puzzlement,
wondering how anyone,
except a madman,
could call you "second"
when you are so splendidly
first,
conferring even on your mother
firstness, vastness, fullness
as the moon at its fullest
lights up the sky.
Now the moon is full again
& you are four weeks old.
Little lion, lioness,
yowling for my breasts,
rowling at the moon,
how I love your lustiness,
your red face demanding,
your hungry mouth howling,
your screams, your cries
which all spell life
in large letters
the color of blood.
You are born a woman
for the sheer glory of it,
little redhead, beautiful screamer.
You are no second sex,
but the first of the first;
& when the moon's phases
fill out the cycle
of your life,
you will crow
for the joy
of being a woman,
telling the pallid moon
to go drown herself
in the blue ocean,
& glorying, glorying, glorying
in the rosy wonder
of your sunshining wondrous
self.
Erica Jong
Since publishing her grounding-breaking first novel, "Fear of Flying" in 1973, best-selling American feminist writer Erica Jong (born 1942) has published fiction, collections of poetry, and countless articles about the lives of women, focusing on stories of sex, love, possibilities, and adventure.
Erica Jong grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in a house of artists. Jong's mother was a portrait painter whose parents had immigrated from Odessa in Russia in the early twentieth century. Her father was a songwriter who became a businessman so he could support the family. "We had all the problems of a New York Jewish intellectual family, " Jong commented in a Washington Post interview in 1997. "It was hard to get a word in at the dinner table. When I first saw Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, I thought he was writing about me."
Always Circling Back to Writing
Jong attended New York's public High School of Music and Art in the 1950s, concentrating on art and writing. She read voraciously, especially Russian novels, and wrote poems, reading them aloud to whomever would listen. As an undergraduate at Barnard College, Jong intended to become a doctor, "to support herself while she wrote on the side, 'like William Carlos Williams"' she noted in a 1997 New York Times Book Review article. Instead, she eventually majored in writing and literature, studying with biographer James Clifford and poet Robert Pack, both of whom helped her to think of herself as a writer. "Don't worry, Erica, " Jong remembered Pack saying after she expressed worry about her zoology classes, "you're a poet." Exhibiting her typical, lifelong energy for the arts, Jong also edited the Barnard literary magazine and produced poetry programs for the Columbia University campus radio station. In 1963, she graduated from Barnard, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. She was also briefly married to her first husband, Michael Werthman, around this time.
Jong studied eighteenth-century English literature at Columbia, and received her M.A. in 1965. She married Allan Jong, a child psychiatrist, the following year. Continuing her education as a post-graduate, Jong studied poetry at Columbia's School of the Arts with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. About this time, she published two books of poetry, Fruits and Vegetables and Half-Lives. "Welcome Erica Jong, " declared James Whitehead in his Saturday Review critique of Fruits and Vegetables, "and welcome the sensuality she has so carefully worked over in this wonderful book…. Clearly she has worked hard to gain this splendid and various and serious comic vision." Immersed in the world of academia, however, Jong continued her studies in the doctoral program at Columbia, intending to become a professor. "I was such an academic, " she commented in the New York Times Book Review. "I don't recognize myself when I look back. I knew exactly how to write tedious, footnoted tomes, and never suspected I would do anything else."
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