Poem: Muse

The posture is flattering
reclined there against the cushions; hips
dipped below the level of her torso
ribs thrust slightly forward.

Thinning.

Light glows on her eyelids, is felt
in every contour of her body,
erases its boundaries
while around her
thirty pencils attempt to re-chart them.
Their scratching fills the air.

She is a fossil being unearthed.

A monk in meditation.

At first all she can feel is
the excruciating pain of stillness, numb
except for her toes
which alone are in range of the space heater.
But then—Release.

She is a patron saint of some kind,
doesn’t even care by now
what their renditions of her look like.
There is only consent; an offering
both of her beauty and her imperfection
to that grayness between sight and page.

She smiles, breathes deep, and a moment later
at least three pencils drop with a frustrated clack.
“You moved,” they inform her, and she tries in vain
to find her way back again.

The 'Author Narrative'

In this post on the Guardian's BookBlog, Jean Edelstein examines Costa's recent trumpeting of its award winner, Raphael Selbourne's history as a scooter salesman. Publishers do seem to love those kinds of details when they're writing copy. They impose a sort of romance-novelish arch on the life behind the work, and thus help make the author more marketable. From humble beginnings to literary super-stardom, as it were (although 'beginnings' here is a bit misleading because publication, validating though it is, rarely exempts writers from the ignoble task of bread-winning).

In her article, Edelstein bemoans (rightly, I think) the marketing of a writer's narrative over the narrative s/he has created; the commercialization of the figure as well as the work. What do you think? Will the two months I spent selling cable ever help me make millions?