Erica Jong

I remember journalists and newsreaders giggling like naughty schoolboys when Erica Jong came to New Zealand back in the 90's.

I listened to them and discounted them after hearing her interview. They were schoolboyish in understanding and she was clearly an interesting woman and writer.
Erica Jong grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the second daughter in a "New York Jewish intellectual family," a milieu remarkably similar, she has said, to the one depicted by Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters. In her entry in Current Biography 1975, she recalls being "smothered with opportunity -- piano lessons, skating lessons, summer camps, art school." After attending New York's prestigious High School of Music and Art, she went on the earn a Bachelor's Degree in English at Barnard College and an M.A. from Columbia University in Eighteenth-century English Literature. She left Columbia before completing her Ph.D. to write Fear of Flying.

Some of her poems can be found here . Today I liked this one.

For My Husband
You sleep in the darkness,
you with the back I love
& the gift of sleeping
through my noisy nights of poetry.

I have taken other men into my thoughts
since I met you.
I have loved parts of them.
But only you sleep on through the darkness
like a mountain where my house is planted,
like a rock on which my temple stands,
like a great dictionary holding every word--
even some
I have never spoken.

You breathe.
The pages of your dreams are riffled
by the winds of my writing.
The pillow creases your cheek
as I cover pages.

Element in which I swim
or fly,
silent muse, backbone, companion--
it is unfashionable
to confess to marriage--
yet I feel no bondage
in this air we share.

Erica Mann Jong