A Poem by Stephanie Burt
Disco Fantasia on Themes from Elizabeth Bishop
‘If you want to write well, always avoid these words . . . lifestyle . . . experience . . . relationship . . . commitment . . . “to have sex” . . . stance.’ —Elizabeth Bishop
Sometimes you’d rather not have had the experience.
For instance, quitting smoking: a lifestyle
Builds itself up around a commitment
To inhale acrid embers, a stance
Towards death (which takes us all in the end) and a relationship
To a future self that wants so much to (say) have sex
That you would die for it, though to ‘have’ sex
Is always to lose it, since no worthy experience
Can be caught, as in a bear trap, and no warm relationship
Deserves to be cast in cold figures. Lifestyles
Of famous club DJs take place at some distance
From where people simply hold hands, or relish commitment,
Or keep a promise just to keep it: some commitments
Can’t go (click!) back in a box, though an applicant’s sex
Can melt like wax in the right hands. Check your own stance
So haters won’t knock you off balance. Try to experience
That moment, with its thick vibe, as a diamond stylus
Turning the vinyl tracks of your new relationship
Into a throwdown for strobe-tossed floors. Relationship
Heaven and hell weren’t built, but fermented: commitments
To metaphysics, or a spicy BBQ lifestyle,
Or a new way to have sex
Through closed eyelids, won’t help, though experience
Will, in the way that a certain distance
From first love makes the heart grow. Keep your distance
From anyone who says their relationship
With you must be the greatest experience
You’ve ever had: that’s like the red shoes, like commitments
To surmount the falls in a barrel. The University of Sussex
Offers courses on people like us, whose lifestyle
Baffles outsiders. If we do mate for life, our style
May deliquesce nonetheless, as our happenstance
Solidifies into limestone, or intersects
With how rain carves all things: the relationship
Of Theseus replaces Theseus, despite his commitment
To bring himself safely to port. The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Got it right with ‘Little Wing’: lifestyle means a stance
Where you can watch fledglings, having learned what ‘commit’ meant
From nests on the mainmasts. I rush to people who seek me. That’s where I get my experience.
Stephanie Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. Her most recent book of poems, We Are Mermaids, came out in 2022. Look for Super Gay Poems (her essays; other people's poems) in 2025.
