Ana Božičević's "I Feel Like"

Thoughts on magic, if we'll let it be.

I Feel Like

An old vampire
In the middle of
War
Still made to feel like
A child
By the snow



from New Life (Wave Books, 2023)

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To choose just one poem to write about from Ana Božičević’s newest book, New Life, is a fucking impossible task. I really mean it. There’s this poem, but then there’s also “CFNR,” which reads:

Instead of getting
Upset
That sometimes I wake up
Crying For No Reason,
I’m thinking
Maybe I am crying for
All the times I couldn’t
And now I can
So it’s alright
And then it stops.
All it needed was a little story.

Or “5 Things at 40,” which reads:

You are not crazy, it’s the patriarchy
You’re not a loser, it’s the capitalism
You are not old, time’s not really a thing
You’re not alone, I’m here
You’re made of stars, that’s fucking cool

There’s Božičević’s ode to a cloud, which is not spelled cloud but is instead an almost adorable tiny outline-drawing of a cloud, which ends with the reminder: I still believe in beauty.

And so, if it’s alright, I’d like to write about today’s poem, but I’d like to also write about all of these poems. I’d like to write about “Island,” the poem I thought most about writing about (and, coincidentally, published years ago in The Believer along with the poems mentioned above).

“Island” begins:

For once in
My life
I got a bit of money
For writing a poem
About New York
I thought of all the things
I might do with my money
It would pay
For a trip home
To the as yet undiscovered
Blue island of the
Soul

It already does, in these short lines, what I’ve grown to love about so much of Božičević’s work: it jars the world right up against the soul, reminding me of these lines from Larry Levis:

The Self sounds like a guy raking leaves
Off his walk. It sounds like the scrape of the rake.
The soul is just a story the scraping tells.

And that story is heightened, at least for me, by Božičević’s downward momentum, the staccato propulsion of her lines, the way they enact the everyday — the mosquito landing on your ankle in the middle of a conversation, the car horn blaring through the music in your headphones, the surprise of good or bad news. Such things happen like a line break, a rupture that does not separate the poem into another, but continues the poem downward, and all the way through.

How does a poem enact a life? If life is the mess we make of ourselves, then a poem can be the arrangement of that mess, whatever allows for new definitions — the way that the fact of seeing anything at all, even the worst possible thing, still requires light. A poem, then, is some arrangement of light.

Božičević continues her poem:

But no
Instead
I got bedbugs
I looked into the sheath
Where the money
Had been
The empty place
Laughed
Where is your island?

I love how But no and Instead live on their own lines, how they surprise the poem in the same way that they might surprise a life: quickly, turning the day like a key in the lock of a door you didn’t know existed until that moment — and perhaps didn’t want to know existed at all. And then later, Božičević writes:

But there’s
Time
Tonight I
Sleep in the hammock
And tell my jokes to the
Cat
I’m drinking beer
This poem sucks
Cause I’m so happy

And it’s the ending of this poem that reminds me of today’s poem, of the vampire “made to feel like / A child / By the snow.” It’s a touch of joy, a sudden and beautiful strangeness. “This poem sucks / Cause I’m so happy” — and yet the poem exists, doesn’t it? We’ve read the entire poem to reach this moment. It exists beyond definition, even the definition its speaker might ascribe to it. It simply lives. I find that sudden and beautiful strangeness throughout all of Božičević’s work, which I first read at Book Culture on 112th Street¹, which harbors one of the best places to read a poem, tucked far away in the upstairs stacks, with your back to the middle of the alphabet of fiction’s last names — you know, from, say, Iris Murdoch to Marilynne Robinson. A good place to be. And I was reading Božičević’s Joy of Missing Out, my shoulder leaning on the shelves, and I was smiling, absolutely smiling to myself, encountering openings to poems like this one:

Remember feelings before emoji
Remember seeing the stars in the sky?

Or endings like this one:

So I cried and stayed here on Earth

Which is also a star

Sometimes you get in a poem and you don’t want to leave it. Not for some silly reason. No, you cannot live in a poem. Surely not. But you can live in the space it creates in yourself. You can live in that soft-cloud of newfound awareness. You can live in the anger it inspires, and the joy. You can live in the generosity, the permission, the allowance. You can live in the fact of being reminded. I live in that all of the time. I have to be reminded to live there, but I do. Which means I don’t always, but then I am reminded, and I do. I am so often reminded to remember, to see, to wonder. I am reminded to rage, to laugh, to put LOL into a poem, to compare myself to a vampire, to think about the snow. I am reminded that I am made of stars, yes, and I am also reminded that that’s fucking cool. I am reminded of these things by poems, and so I don’t want to leave them, because I don’t want to be in a space when I need such reminders, even though — as poems so often remind me — I know I will be, at least eventually.

And so now I am brought to today’s poem — this short, beautiful thing. In the same way as “Island,” it’s the ending of the image provided by today’s poem — the vampire, old and weary and perhaps embittered, in a world more cruel than it could ever be, finding joy in the world that is not the cruel one, but is in fact that same world where one might still believe in beauty, which is this world, even when it’s hard to find — that remains with me, long after the poem has been read and re-read and dog-eared. Long after the book has been put down next to me, where it is still, as I’m writing this.

And it’s also the opening image that stays with me, too. The “old vampire / In the middle of / War.” The way it is at once specific and metaphorical. How I think of a vampire, lonely in a country made even more lonely by war, wandering amidst the wreckage, looking for someone, anyone, and not finding anyone. I think of the origins of the word vampire stemming from Eastern Europe, and I think of the constancy of the war that goes on and goes on and goes on in Ukraine now.

And I think, too, of someone made older by the strange isolating tendency of this world, made to feel lonelier for who they are or what they desire. I think of the violence of various forms of surveillance and data-mining and actions taken under the guise of justice, and I think of how strange it is, for such violence to occur during what might be called a time of peace. All a vampire wants is blood, another word for life, another word for warmth. Strange, then, for such a desire to render someone so old, so lonely, and so ashamed, even. So, yes, vampire of this poem. I hope you make angels out of your time in the snow.

In some ways, today’s poem feels almost like an inverted version of Charles Simic’s poem, “January,” which reads:

Children's fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse.

An empire, I read somewhere,
Maintains itself through
The cruelty of its prisons.

Simic’s poem begins with the near-magic and innocence of snow, and then reminds us of how such an image can be tarnished by the latent violence harbored and structured and unleashed by a society and a state and a world. If there was joy in the opening image — the joy of a child drawing a face, a word, an idea in a pane of frozen glass — that joy is erased by what comes after. The school feels imprisoning. The children feel cold. All play is gone. The poem’s opening image haunts instead of laughs. Božičević’s poem begins with world-weary violence and ends with innocence. Both poems remind me of what is lost and what is possible. They remind me of what cruelty does to the imagination, what it can ruin in an image and a life.

I’m thinking of a poem by Bill Knott, “Alternate Fates”:

What if right
in the middle of a battle
across the battlefield the wind
blew thousands of
lottery tickets, what then?

It’s the kind of poem that might feel silly to someone at first read, in the same way that seemingly-absurd hypothetical questions are almost always, in popular culture, attributed to inattentive kids or wayward figures in society. But then you sit with it again and that silliness becomes a seriousness of imagination. Ah fuck, you might say, what then — really, what then? And you’re left to wonder — which is a good thing, wonder — what might happen in this alternate world, which is not so much an alternate world, but is in fact this one, bound up as it is in violence and money and chance and circumstance, each of these things blowing across the battlefield. And then maybe you laugh-cry at the world, and you wonder even more. Taking strangeness seriously, taking weirdness seriously, taking silliness seriously, taking snow seriously, taking play seriously — these are things I’ve learned from poems. Sometimes such things make me feel lonelier. When you don’t feel kinship in the strangeness that you love, maybe you begin to feel a little vampiric — longing for warmth, yet lonely. But the snow is a good friend. So is a dog jumping through it.

There’s a phrase I encountered in Ali Smith’s novel Spring. Simply put, the phrase is: magic if you’ll let it be. Magic if you’ll let it be. Magic if you’ll let it be. One more time. Magic if you’ll let it be. Yes. It’s the unsaid part of today’s poem. The letting it be. The vampire — old, weary, wartorn, and perhaps broken as they are — still has to choose to let the snow render them into a child. It might not feel like a choice, but it is still a letting-it-be. So much of this world is magic if we let it be. Our love, our actions, our everyday. Even our heartbreak, the roots of our discontent. Even the bedbugs, as Božičević reminds me. Even the anger of not having enough, and even the joy you can find regardless. Magic if you’ll let it be. Cruelty, I think, tests our capacity to acknowledge the capacity for something like magic. Poetry, I know, reminds me of our capacity, even in the midst of cruelty, to acknowledge something like magic.

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1. Ah, cool, a footnote — the first time I’ve done this. Yeah. I just want to say, hey, if you’re reading this, and you live in NYC or are just visiting, and if you want something nice to do, here’s what I’d say. Go to Book Culture on 112th Street. Just around the corner from Broadway. Maybe beforehand you get one of the best slices of pizza in NYC from Mama’s Too, or a perfect bagel from Absolute Bagels. Or maybe beforehand you walk through the best museum in NYC — the Nicholas Roerich Museum, which is free, as all museums should be, and full of these absolutely spiritual and stunning-beyond-belief landscapes of mountains held in perfect blue-gold light. Anyways, maybe you do those things, maybe you don’t. But whatever. What’d I’d say is that you go upstairs in Book Culture, into the stacks, away from the new shit. And just wander up there. Check out anthropology. Literary criticism. Walk the length of the wraparound fiction section. Turn around when poetry is at your back. And then, buy a book. Used, even! It’s got one of those stickers that says used. That’s how you know. It’s cheaper, too. And then, take that book east on 112th toward Amsterdam, and turn right, walk a block, cross the street, and go into Hungarian Pastry Shop. Get whatever you want. I love their almond horns (crescents?), which, when they are perfect, are crunchy on the outside and succulent-sweet-moist on the inside. My wife loves their chocolate chip cookie. She thinks it’s the best in the city. My friend George loves their lemon cake. Just get something. Sit inside. Sit outside. Be slightly afraid of the various conversations being had over time through sharpie on the bathroom wall. And read your book. And the birds will come, I promise. They will come to eat your crumbs.