Introducing Maria Theresa

When JSR turned recently to The Hinternet’s crew of Associate Editors to ask us how, in our view, we might effectively expand the repertoire of our offerings, my mind leapt immediately to poetry. Poetry! I thought, notwithstanding one recent effort in that direction —in a language, JSR often seems to forget, to which not all our readers have access— is the one genre whose potentials The Hinternet has yet really to explore.

The only lingering question, for me, was how to find the poet whose style and sensibility might actually work in the ever-expanding Hinternet purview. Well, after I’d bothered our Founding Editor about the idea for a while, he finally agreed, and set me loose with the single commandment: “Find me a poet, and let it be a special one.”

I admit this was all a slight feint on my part, as, I soon told him, I’d known all along exactly the poet I was trying to get. The only issue was that this was a person who had been, up until now, uniquely resistant to being got.

I had met her four years ago, through a mutual friend, first online, eventually in person. She was from St. Louis, originally; she’d even gone to the University of Missouri around the same time I did, and had since gone off to New York to work in copywriting at a major ad firm (whose name she insisted I not reveal). At university she was singularly determined to find a pathway to becoming a writer, and she always told me her truest form was poetry. But in the years after she’d moved to New York, just before COVID, she found herself rubbing right up against the nascent Dimes Square scene (in fact it was from her that I first heard about it, and, from my remote perch in the Midwest, I always looked forward to her reports immensely). For the most part whatever was happening in that scene, for us at The Hinternet, might as well have been occurring on Venus, given that we, as JSR likes to say, “think in centuries”, or even “sub specie aeternitatis”, and unlike Baudelaire we remain unconvinced that the eternal may be all too easily discovered in the ephemeral.

Anyhow our poet ended up publishing some of her work in various magazines. Many of our own readers and writers would likely recognize her true name, if it were to be revealed. But as a poet she’s always written under a most suggestive nom de plume — Maria Theresa. This is, she says, to keep a proper distance between her real literary work, and her milieu.

At JSR’s encouragement, I initiated a stubborn, exhausting e-mail campaign with MT, imploring her relentlessly to let us finally get some of her poetry out into the open. After some months of this, I finally received the following message from her:

Look, I don’t like this shit, and most days I’d rather no poem of mine was ever published, at least not until long after I’m dead. Considering the dull, humorless kitsch they’ve been pushing in places like the NYT bestseller list for decades, I’m almost ashamed to even call myself a poet these days. But if I’m going to make an exception, then, sure, I suppose the Hinternet is the place for me to do it. You asked me to say a little bit about my poems: well, it’s a spiritual issue. Half the reason I never want to publish, why I never even tell people I write poetry, is cause it gets real woo-woo real fast. People tend to backpedal and make for the exits. Because what my poetry comes down to is a boundless love for Marianne Moore — seriously, you can’t conceive of the love I have for that woman. I’m from St. Louis, just like she was. Even as a little girl I felt I literally could commune with the spirit of the great woman. Marianne is my mother; I am her daughter. And in some important sense, the reverse is also true. I’ve never known how to describe it. Though maybe it’s not so weird after all — isn’t all poetry some kind of séance? Mine is just more literally so: if I write, then it’s to maintain that cosmic connection with my beautiful Modernist mother; to preserve the fragile cord connecting her world (taxonomies, technologies, encyclopedic verses, and technical dazzlement) to my own (unhealthy obsessions with Didion, Babitz, e-cig girlies, gays, Dimes Square phenoms, and New York bohemian wannabes) [JSR comment — “What is all this?”]. When I channel the spirit of my Great Mother Marianne, and my poetry is true to that spirit, I see how it’s all the same thing. Then the séance is a singularity. And poetry becomes the method for treating time like the sad, sorry bitch it is. Or some shit like that. I don’t know — say whatever you want. As long as all the poems are attributed to Maria Theresa.

The Moore influence had been obvious to me from the moment MT hesitantly showed me her first “book” of poems. I thought her work was so cool, I even begged her to let me share some of it at my own site, Vita Contemplativa (the best I could do was to share some translation work she’s doing, in this piece from earlier this year). Finally, I managed to get her and JSR together for a brief colloquy, and here we are. Although I am not quite sure what he really thinks of it, he did mention briefly to me (1) that he’d never read any Marianne Moore poems except “The Jelly-Fish”, which he found most whimsical and pleasant, much like the “light verse” of Ogden Nash, as for example: “I don’t mind eels / Except as meals. / And the way they feels”, at which point I tried to explain to him that Moore is working at a whole different level entirely, but whatever; and (2) that he admired MT’s creative use of pseudonymy, remarking that “There’s room for more than one Kierkegaardian in our lifeboat of culture” — which I took to be his way of greenlighting the present post, before he disappeared back into his makeshift kitchen laboratory, where, it seems, he has been attempting, these past few weeks, to “synthesize sulfur”.

The great charm of Maria Theresa, I believe you will agree, is inseparable from her aversion to publishing, her love of anonymity, and from the impossibility of ever placing her, one imagines, anywhere other than here. Her work, even if this is not how she intended it (for she intended it as one intends a prayer inserted on paper in the Wailing Wall, or a Sanskrit inscription carved into the hidden, downward-facing side of a stone used in building a temple — namely, to be read by no human being). Her work, in this respect, gives a new meaning to the old phrase, used for stuff like Andy Goldsworthy’s spiral earth sculptures made from twigs and leaves and other such humus: her work, that is, is “site-specific”.

The site in question is The Hinternet.

—Sam Jennings
London

Chronos as an It Girl
After Marianne Moore

It’s not Time as in Time’s-Up but it
   is Time like 
      the magazine no one reads. “It”
does not pretend to know whether it is man or woman,
or an accident, or a demon
from some older-ass, whiter-ass, time.

Ass! It’s a time of Callipygi-
   -an women,
       girls waking up from Jane Austen
genres of dreams. Ah Mr. Willoughby, do you know her,
Chronos, the It-girl? the many-eyed
and many-faced Titan of dimes square?

 Titan or Titian, art’s temporal—
     “And the coke 
         is mostly fentanyl these days.”
She’d rather be in Cabo, honestly, the people there
look like they want you to have their ba-
-bies. Because they have their own, is why. 

In a cracked mirror, nabbed from a
    tan package,
        that read “c/o Joan Didion,”
Chronos the It Girl makes her face, then primps water lilies,
which she places in the pool before
the guests show, demanding: “Vodka, neat.”

Who has a pool in New York these days?
     “I heard she 
         ate her son.” “No, silly, she just
ate her placenta. Placidly.” Everybody is do-
-ing it, everybody wants to stay 
young, until they suddenly want kids. 

“But brush fires in California,” you
       overhear
         some boy say, a boy who claimed once
he was a poet, but when somebody challenged him to
read a verse, he recited the words
to “Ms. Jackson” and everyone booed.

But now it’s time—Time’s Up! Times Square!
     The New York 
        Times front page reads: “You don’t have to
go home but you can’t stay here.” She’s tired, Chronos is,
she suddenly feels much older than
when the party had just begun. Go

home! You stupid Greeks, you dumb Romans,
     stumble back
        to whomever’s bed you left,
and let her sleep a beautiful It-Girl sleep, to the dul-
-cet sounds of New York architecture,
which tick like clocks: American Time.

—

The Internet

Someone called it
“That great, gray ocean.” 
So how does a girl go about
Marrying an ocean? (haha)
Though I do wonder—
Would her gray bridal veil
Be opaque,
Like the Baltic Sea?

I am become Sappho,
Lesbian for oceans,
I want to eat the oceanary internet,
Eat its children for my food;
I want to fuck the internet,
Not just fuck on the internet,
Like a slut for gray,
For soupy, glitch-glitter sex.

A brief list of things I love about the internet:

That people used to say “surfing” unironically;

A life easily organized by peak posting times;

When “Horny On Main” made me think of rhinoceri;

Ethernet cables that trawl under oceans;

Forgetting for a while that I have a small intestine;

Video clips of rabbits the size of labradors;

Labradors that sound like people;

People who happen to look like rabbits;

Eyes slowly turning to spumescent jelly;

Bluelight threatening cancer of the eyelids;

Spiky coffee mornings listless awake monotone scrolling;

Eating nothing for 24 hours;

Signing emails as “the ghost of the century…”;

Post-post-modernity, no more symbols, no more gods;

Freedom like an octopus, brains in all my limbs;

Reaching out and no longer touching anything;

I love it I love it I love it I love it;

I really do want to be a body but

Who wouldn’t exchange their hymen for a credit card?

I’m a kleptomaniac of the Internet,
I take off my bra and let it sun my stupid breasts,
Digital rays seeping into my white and red blood cells,
And then I will announce to the screen: 
“I do—until death do us part, I do.
I want to have your internet babies,
And teach them to dream like little art-robots,
Electric sheep leaping across their bed-screens in the evenings,
And my wife the internet smoothly singing them to sleep.
In this dream, I am an Amazon woman—
Get it? I have bought myself new, better eyes,
And microchip fingernails, and eyelashes of plexiglass filament,
And neat little AI-powered heel-wheels,
That scoot me along the polished floors of my house
A house which talks to me, which I guess is my wife, too—
The children are laughing and crying but I do not
Care which is which, sound doesn’t matter here,
I never worry in the evenings,
Or bite my fingernails during the day,
I love my body like I never could have, then:
And, having unsexed the men,
A Communist of digital-archival science,
I’ll sprawl like a polyamorous frog in my house,
And never sleep again, and never lose
A moment.”

—

Ms. Marianne Moore
After the Same

When anyone asks me, “Who do you like to
read?” I say: “Marianne Moore and Marianne
Moore and Marianne Moore again.”

If anyone asked me, “What do you want to 
be, when you grow up?” I would say:
“A gardener-by-default, just like the
unmarried Ms. Marianne Moore.” 

But I can admit that I don’t
have the encyclopedist’s esprit;
that I don’t have a true gift
for taxonomies—let alone a gift for planting.

But then I think of what my mother
(“My Mother” – “M.M.” — “Marianne Moore”)
would say to that, if she could, she’d say:
“Yes, but in America, one must 
imagine Sisyphus plucky.
Look at him: daily scaling skyscrapers with nothing
but wires and cables in
his claw-like hands.”

And then she’d say something noble, like: 
“The snow-shoe crab, scuttling over white sands,
like a dream-egg hatched out of 
      a hole in the earth, is business-like, since
‘crustacean stomachs are crabby, but not caustic’ 
    and if he could mewl like a Pallas’s cat, or
if he were dappled like the sun on an ibex
in the middle of a complex Congolese summer,
more like the Sumatran water-buffalo’s gourmet
    diet, or the worm, or the emperor,
then the time it took for him to get from 
New York to Phila-
    -delphia would be roughly congruent,
longitudinally equivalent, to the distance
     from my heart to yours,
‘as far as vital organs are concerned.’”

And then if anyone asked me 
why I love Ms. Marianne Moore, my 
only moorland mother,
I’d show them her words and that would be enough,
and yet, if not,
then I’d say something clever like, “Pure modernity of 
form and life, is only to be defined
by the list. It is modern to live within a catalog.
Anyone who cannot will be crossed out.”