A Bonus

That day I finished 

A small piece 

For an obscure magazine 

And such a starry elation 

Came over me 

That I got whistled at in the street 

For the first time in a long time 

I was dirty and roughly dressed 

And had circles under my eyes 

And far far from flirtation 

But so full of contemplation 

Of a deed duly done 

An act of consummation 

That the freedom and force it engendered 

Shone and spun 

Out of my old raincoat 

It must have looked like love 

Or a fabulous free holiday 

To the young men sauntering 

Down Berwick Street. 

I still think this is most mysterious 

For while I was writing it 

It was gritty it felt like self-abuse 

Constipation, desperately unsocial 

But done done done 

Everything in the world 

Flowed back  

Like a huge bonus.

     -Elizabeth Smart

     I love writing. And writing that is about writing. And, as I am doing now, I obviously love writing about writing that is about writing. I realize that sometimes, as I have just done now, I use the word “writing” to say “reading”; when I said that I “love writing,” I really meant the act of reading, speaking of “writing” as the object, words thrown down upon the page for the act of reading. But I also resist the idea that reading is not a kind of writing. The act of reading is creative, performative, and violent. The reader writes the text as much as the writer does, penetrating it with her own mind, as the pen penetrates the paper (or the stylus would have penetrated clay and wax). So this poem, a poem about finishing the act of writing, and having that fulfillment of finishing being misread, comes to me as a kind of violent play.
     Elizabeth Smart’s poem performs the precarious positioning of writer and reader, which also works in the dimension of writer to reader, and reader to writer. The joy of finishing, the writer sending the little combinations of words out to an “obscure magazine,” is read by the men in the street as a kind of glow—the writer exudes a kind of sexual beauty that to the reader (the men), is unrelated to the writer’s feeling of the text, which is not even in itself beautiful but is rather “gritty” “self-abuse” and “constipation.” So the text moves outwards, into the “freedom and force,” yet is misread by the reader. While the poem could be read as expressing how the sealing up and finishing of the exhausting poem does fuel an inner joy that is then exteriorly projected, the author only “looks like” the beauty that the male readers must see. But this reading does not operate on the text (in this case, the image of the writer who is receiving whistles on the streets), it also operates on the writer herself. What do we make of the “huge bonus,” a phallic presence that finishes the poem? It is just that: both a thing that violates the female body, perhaps as the reader violates the text, and also just a bonus, not the fulfillment itself, but a light, empty benefit that we, as readers and writers, are willing to receive.
          -Isabel Stern