"Red Radio Heart": A Prose Poem and Commentary by the Jane Lunin Perel

Or How to Write a Feminist Prose Poem Just About Everyone Can Appreciate

My dear friend and fellow poet Jane Lunin Perel passed on February 22, 2024, which just happened to be my birthday. When I got the call, trying to deal with a multiple shitty emotions, I instead looked above and said, “Janey, couldn’t you have waited a week?”

Some of you may find such gallows humor inappropriate, but Jane would have loved it. Jane and I often joked that the one thing Irish Catholics (me) and Jews (her) share is a dark sense of humor.

Jane came to the prose poem late and took little time to master it, as the below prose poem and commentary suggest. I could let it rip now and use all of the those hyperbolic words (“brilliant,” “insightful,” “glorious, “groundbreaking,” and so on—all those words that I hope people don’t use at my funeral services (unless they throw in “sexy”), but if I were to go overboard with praise, Jane would be the first to say, “Cut the crap, Peej. Will you just drop the fancy words and feature my work.” For, like most of us poets, her “work” was a huge part of who she was, though it always came second to family and friends.

So I’d like you to meet Carnelia, Jane’s alter ego and heroine of her, O what the hell, “brilliant” and “groundbreaking” collection, Red Radio Heart, which you can purchase at this link. Red Radio Heart

I will miss you, Jane. The world has lost a beautiful, talented, and wonderfully idiosyncratic soul, but, hopefully, this little tribute will help to keep your spirit alive.

Jane Lunin Perel

RED RADIO HEART

Carnelia is tired of her heart. It’s too heavy. When she tries to sleep it bumps, then races. She pictures it, disentangling itself from the system that feeds it, then shrinking, escaping out of her mouth, rolling down the street. Sticky candy apple heart. Road kill heart. She could have a pig’s heart. Or a red radio heart that would play jazz for her but not Bartok. Her heart in a yellow basket that Ella Fitzgerald has lost. Maybe Frankenstein will stagger out from behind the billboard that supports the war. He’ll need a new heart, too. Maybe he’ll scoop up hers and she’ll be free of her clumsy overripe blood orange heart. Meanwhile, the generals beef up attacks.

COMMENTARY

The woman “Carnelia” who possesses the “Red Radio Heart” is telling the story of her “overripe . . . heart.” It is a poem of aging and alienation, which I now realize connects to the ancient and still powerful notions and dogmas concerning what Barbara Creed has called the “Monstrous-Feminine,” depicted so precisely by the writer of Leviticus 15:28-33. That passage reads: “When the woman’s bleeding stops, she must count off seven days. Then she will be ceremonially clean. On the eighth day she must bring two turtledoves or two young pigeons and present them to the priest at the entrance of the Tabernacle. The priest will offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. Through this process, the priest will purify her before the LORD for the ceremonial impurity caused by her bleeding. . . . These are the instructions for dealing with anyone who has a bodily discharge. . . .”

This language frames the great horror of defilement and shame Carnelia has of her female body and its impurities and that I shared as a teenager. But these ideas only created a maddening sense of injustice in me, although the shame resurfaced at times. So here in stating she is “tired of her heart,” she is also “tired” of her body entirely, as it has been degraded by cultural and religious influences and experiencing the “discharges” of surgery.

In contrast now, Carnelia has a freedom to muse about what might happen to her heart when it “escapes out of her mouth” and transforms instantly into “Sticky candy apple heart. Road kill heart.” Or it could be transformed into a “pig’s heart.” These metaphors are ironic, sardonic, and in their way they celebrate the marvelous transformation which takes place in prose poetry in which the poet is liberated from old shame and digs into the unconscious to find far flung images of escape. Granted stickiness and a death by out of bodiness are messy, but the heart has at last escaped.

In defining prose poetry, Michael Benedict asks “What are the special properties of the prose poem?” to which he answers with the words of Baudelaire, “a necessity to attend to the prickings of consciousness beyond ordinary formal requirements. . . .” For me, prose poetry has liberated my capacity to speak directly from the unconscious. I revere this power and marvel that nothing we experience leaves us or disappears. The unconscious contains everything a poet must access through imagery. Memory is enlarged in the unconscious. “A yellow basket that Ella Fitzgerald has lost” reflects the great joy of memory that I have of listening to her singing that song with my father; he was not concerned with my spillage or bodily “discharge,” but rather with my brain and my spirit.

Joy is laced through fatigue, and for me jokes go a long way in accepting surgical procedures and their overflowing margins. The “pig’s heart” is a memory of a friend who had a heart valve replaced by a pig valve. When I called him to see how he was, he answered “oink, oink.” Next in connection with transformation gone beyond what is terrifying, comes “Frankenstein will stagger out from behind the billboard that supports the war.” Let us recall the discharge involved in his creation and in his distorted heart. Also, “the generals beefing up attacks” previews spillage on a massive scale.

In writing prose poems my metaphors have become enormous, macabre, but funny and ironic. I believe I am dictating images that derive directly from my unconscious. My writing reflects abjection and its opposite, joy and freedom. The wonders of prose poetry thrill my mind and spirit, while the rest of me sheds its original parts and secretions.

[There will no requests to subscribe to my Substack page today or to buy my books. Today is Jane’s day].