zodiac13 Dec 2005

I used to work at a traditional bakery - you know, we hand-rolled the bread on a big wood table and all that jazz. Maybe big modern industrial bakeries smell like yeast, too, but this one, in the unventilated basement of a hundred-year-old building smelled amazingly so. I also had this idea that you can smell yeast in an unopened packet.

Oh, and the baking supplies section of any supermarket smells like yeast, too. So on the most superficial level, it's just about yeast smelling fermented and earthy, like turned dirt.

1) I don't think Girlie is necessarily a put-down. I've used the name in 4 poems now for a character whose habits resemble my wife's, so it's hard for me to feel anything but mushy about it.

2) But the character narrating my poems is not always right - or, at least, I spend a lot of time undermining his credibility. I think calling his wife Girlie is a good way of giving an idea of who he is and who his wife is. He doesn't totally respect her, but that could be because she's a little flighty. Again, my wife is the yeast-stockpiler, but she's also a much better person than I am. Who knows? Maybe she's onto something. Of course, metaphorically she's stocking troops, weapons, etc, for an ambiguous purpose, a purpose she doesn't really understand herself but considers The Natural Order of Things. (Yeast does die in its packets if unused.)

For me, the real coup of the poem is the narrator's voice fumbling and justifying up to "we keep our peaces", which is his only true assessment of his wife or his relationship. Thanks. This is the longest I've ever commented explaining one of my own poems. It must be 4am. It is.

Someone's bound to be wondering: My wife thinks it's hilarious that I use her idiosyncracies for shallow poem women.