I don't know whether Maurice Sendak ever explicitly said that imagination should never be limited by false notions of absurdity or risk, but as a kid sprawled out on the floor reading and rereading his books, especially In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are, this is what he taught me. The internet does tell me he said the following: “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

I had enough unsentimental adults orbiting my childhood that one of them very well could have told me this. It would have gone over my head at age six or seven. But when you watch a drunk make an ass of himself, hear the laughter elicited by a joke that shouldn’t have been told, or through thin walls hear moans of pleasure that you are years off from appreciating, what you do come to understand, though you cannot yet articulate it, is that life ain't all Green Eggs and Ham.

I’m grateful for coming to this realization early on, thanks to the lovingly irreverent family and family friends who shaped me and allowed me to appreciate Sendak’s stories in all their naked, doughy, beastly glory. As these books make clear, adults can be jerks, escape beats confinement, and "Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!" (The latter was quoted by Art Spiegelman in a 1993 New Yorker strip.)  They speak to a truth that the child me did not realize I’d been lied to about yet. I wasn’t old enough to go out anywhere further than the yard, and in truth I never actually wanted to run away. But losing myself in my thoughts and delusions, I could see that this was normal and healthy, something that shouldn't be thought of as a waste of time but a crucial part of being alive.

Like most adults, I still daydream like a kid, though I sometimes wish those mental escapes did not end so abruptly thanks to some adult obligation. But that bullshit is a real part of life, the same as trying to imagine it away. Maurice Sendak’s best work exists in that space between the two worlds, an alchemy of the real and imaginary, which is why it resonates with so many of us.

Image: collider.com

[In memory of Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012]

First the undergraduate at Radcliffe College, Harvard, fiercely looking out at the world as her manuscript wins the Yale Younger Poets Prize—

Now, careful arriviste,
Delineate at will
Incisions in the ice.   (The Diamond Cutters, 1951)

—and a calm but insistent feminist writing history through, for example, Emily Dickinson—

you, woman, masculine
in single-mindedness,
for whom the word was more
than a symptom –

a condition of being.
Till the air buzzing with spoiled language
sang in your ears
of Perjury   (I Am in Danger— Sir—, 1964)

—and then a woman, pure and simple, writing capital-H History through her own life—

 I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. ... In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language.   (The Burning of Paper Instead of Children, 1968)

—and determined to root out truth with her writing—

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
 . . . the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth   (Diving into the Wreck, 1972)

—and a poet whose poems, as W. H. Auden said, “speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs”—

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.   (I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus, 1968)

—and herself a multitude of personae, calling herself by turns feminist, intellectual, Jewish, deeply political, mother and wife, lesbian, and yet always human—

If they call me man-hater, you
would have known it for a lie

 . . . But can’t you see me as a human being
he said

What is a human being
she said   (From an Old House in America, 1974)

—and now an elder stateswoman, her life tempered by death—

Burnt by lightning    nevertheless
she’ll walk this terra infinita   (Itinerary, 2012)

—unforgettable, unmistakable, a poet whose lines have wrenched open a space for marginalized voices, a poet to whom twenty-first-century letters owes an immeasurable debt.

Image credit: chicagotribune.com

[The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard is out today from the Library of America. In homage to his singular writing, I’ve decided to create an “I Remember” of my own.]

I remember picking apples at Eckert’s orchards.

I remember waking up in the wrong bed entirely.

I remember trying on hats with my sister.

I remember reading Joe Brainard for the first time. I thought I Rememberwas a joke at first, then a wistful way to look at the world, then the only way I should look at my life.

I remember tearing a marigold out of our garden because I thought it was just a weed. My mother was so upset with me, even though she knew it was a mistake.

I remember when I got into college. There was a thin envelope, and the words didn’t say “we regret,” so I couldn’t understand it and I had to give it to someone who could read it to me.

I remember the first real date I went on. The first real date, when neither of us were trying to be grown-up or impress each other. Three hours later, I didn’t want it to ever end.

I remember learning how to make crêpes.

I remember making them far too often after that until everybody was tired of eating them.

I remember my first and my last cigarette. I got bored and gave it back to the friend who had let me try it.

I remember flipping the light switch up and down until I was able to hold it at exactly the point to make the whole room very dim but still lit.

I remember when I figured out that I’d never had Brussels sprouts in my life, ever. Then I told my mother that was one thing she had done right.

I remember watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with my little brother on Halloween weekend: him petrified as the suspenseful music rose and rose, and me bored as I couldn’t hear it.

I remember setting the hands into the face of a clock I’d made out of wood. It’s still on the wall at home, ticking away.

I remember all six warts I had on my fingers (three on my left pointer finger alone).

I remember learning that Lucian Freud had died and recalling first that one of my close friends called him her favorite portraitist ever, and second that he had offered to sketch the actress Joan Collins about which she wrote, many years later: “To my great regret, I said sorry, no, as I had to get back to my afternoon studies.”

I remember a ten-foot-high inflatable globe that I stepped into. I couldn’t find any of the countries because I was looking at the world inside-out.

I remember watching the first season of Lost on DVD, and realizing three days and twenty-five episodes later that I was completely hooked.

I remember every house I moved out of.

I remember, I do remember.

Image credit: joebrainard.org