Jon Frankel

Reposted from Jon's blog The Last Bender

AGAINST A NOVELIST’S METAPHOR

by Jon Frankel

I wrote this poem in response to an interview I heard on NPR with a Granta editor. He had edited an issue with new, young novelists whom he characterized as bold and free of the irony and restrictions of older writers, who seemed to him afraid of expressing themselves. I agree with that. But then he used as an example a novelist who described the heart as a pulpy mass. This is certainly emotional, but it is also a hackneyed phrase that is totally inaccurate. My daughter Zanzibar had the night before described at dinner how each cell of the heart beats in a rhythm. Arhythmias can arise in a group of cells, and they can cauterize these cells to return the heart to its proper rhythm. The heart then is a marvelously complex organ, holographic in structure. So I wrote this poem:

Against a Novelist’s Metaphor

The heart is not a pulpy mass
But a chambered being like a brain
With one divided thought at a pass
From left and right by systole to gain
When each cell beats its part in time
As when pulsing bells of jellyfish
And buoys rocked by swells, align.

To call the heart a mass is foolish;
This muscle’s fretted diastole
Returns blood set out like hounds
To roam over deserts. Wistfully
It drives between two bounds.
The heart is where love’s bow is bent
And time’s sharpest arrow is spent.

-Jon Frankel