T A B L E_ T A L K

Are America's ivy-covered walls withering from incompetence? Discuss the state of higher learning in the Education area of Table Talk

___________________

Unleash your poetic muse in barnesandnoble.com's poetry section
___________________

R E C E N T L Y

Darwinian admissions
By Megan Olden
Are selective universities turning a blind eye to some students in need?
(01/18/99)

Only the nearly perfect need apply
By Jennifer King
With medical schools rejecting the vast majority of their applicants, what's an aspiring Hippocrates to do?
(01/15/98)

Bad chemistry
By Lori Gottlieb
When your lab partner is an obsessive compulsive, not even the data is safe
(01/13/99)

Camille on Campus
By Camille Paglia
As academics allow our state education to languish, private parochial schools may lead to more cultural divides
(01/13/99)

Is history dead?
By Sean McMeekin
Cultural studies scholars are ravaging the facts to suit their bassackward theories
(01/11/99)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

IN THE LETTERS OF MY NAME | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -

I was flattered to realize what the anonymous poet was writing about. More than flattered, I was astonished and excited and attentive. Flabbergasted and amazed. Dumbfounded, staggered, astounded. I had never been wooed in verse. I had scarcely been wooed at all in recent memory, and what could be more arousing than a brave poet who understood the erotics of concealment, of anonymity? This could be my brilliant poststructuralist lover for the new millennium. This could be the one whose mind would be the shimmer off an article by Geoffery Hartman, whose body would be the vanishing glory of autumn in a mirror. I took this fantasy seriously long enough to act. I wrote a nine-line poem without structure in which I endeavored to be as obscure as possible. I have been a practicing poet for nearly six years, and with that training I succeeded at opacity so far as to be unable even now to recall the meaning I intended in the poem I tacked up on a bulletin board where the mysterious person would be sure to see it.

My correspondent had managed to expose and to remain hidden, a simultaneity of revelation and privacy that I found fascinating. Isn't this the essence of seduction? The bathing suit that covers but does not cover, the "sweet nothings" that are uttered but do not communicate? And this person was revealing him- or herself with the most intimate language, all the while concealing her- or himself behind the curtain of obscurity. I responded far less cleverly but with a kind of bravado by placing both of our poems on a public bulletin board where they could be both a real private (albeit partially anonymous) dialogue and a public work of art. I have never had sex in the library -- an informal requirement for graduation at my school -- but I imagine the rush is similar to what I felt with my torn pieces of paper and my Scotch tape and my thumbtacks, looking over my shoulder and rummaging in my bag in order to pretend that I was looking for a pen to write down the name of the Amnesty International contact person.

Soon the mysterious lover-by-text responded. Nine-line poems were appearing on the bulletin board, in my mailbox, in my e-mail account. I was overwhelmed and inundated, and gradually I began to be frightened. It was a delicious fear at first, but for a moment it became a nightmarish fear and I wrote a poem of many lines and even less coherence than the rest, protesting in the strongest language against all that was unfair about my lopsided ignorance of the situation.

All of my new friend's poems began with the letter I. I did not know the reason for this, and had I known I might have been more frightened still. The story is reaching its end, so I can explain the "I," the "Imagine," the "Intrigue," the "Inferno": The messages I had been receiving were all acrostics built upon the letters of my name. I felt and still feel foolish for failing to realize that each of these poems I had been reading and occasionally feverishly re-reading for a period of over a week spelled out my name along the left-hand margin, and I can only say in my defense that nothing in my undergraduate major in English literature prepared me for it.

The reaction to my angry poem was subdued. It was clear to me by now that I was probably not in correspondence with the fantastical goddess-lover-poet of my dreams, but rather some real person whom I probably already knew in some way. This was probably someone who saw me (from what distance I couldn't know) every day. He or she knew my face, my name, my specific vulnerability to this seduction. My anger was gone, but my sense of exposure increased literally by the hour. So I sent a brief demand by e-mail (the person had set up an anonymous e-mail account) that we meet.

She replied, acceding to my request and dissolving the mystery with a poem in the letters of her own name. Because her identity was no longer secret, our meeting in a remote corner of an empty cafe lacked some of the high-stakes psychodrama and practically all the eroticism of the preceding days. The poet was a woman I knew, who had once asked me out to dinner. She was attractive, smart, but very real, and under the circumstances that reality could hardly fail to disappoint. She renewed her invitation, and I again declined. We spoke carefully and quietly about the episode. We told each other that it had been interesting, and that we would see each other around.
SALON | Jan. 20, 1999

Isaac Zaur is a senior at Haverford College. His last piece for Seven Deadly Sins was about video-game addiction.