Erica Jong’s website [https://www.ericajong.com] is a cornucopia of captivating things. There is a Zen-like list of 20 rules for writers, ending with the enigmatic: “There are no rules.” There is an interview about her love affair with Italian culture, a video of a Playboy interview (with Jong and her daughter), and another video of an interview on International Women’s day.
Front and center on the site is a link to a news release about Jong’s latest (2019) book of poems, “The World Began With Yes”. And since we are now in the middle of National Poetry Month, I wanted to read and reflect on this book by an author who previously I had known only for her groundbreaking novels, especially the truly wonderful “Sappho’s Leap”, about the loves and conflicts of antiquity’s most celebrated female poet.
Jong, the iconic voice who for generations redefined female desire and ambition, returns to poetry, her first love, with “The World Began With Yes,” a collection incandescent with wisdom, humor, ferocious sincerity, tender sensuality, and life-affirming energy.
With clarity and grace, Jong navigates the sinuous currents of a woman’s life. Everything between love and death can be found here, including meditations on the complexities of aging, memory, loss, and the enduring pulse of desire. Her language is both exquisitely honed and thrillingly spontaneous, weaving together luminous imagery, sharp insights, and moments of raw, personal vulnerability. These poems glow with lived experience, praising the body in all its aspects, the sharpness of the mind, and the unbreakable spirit that insists — as all great poets and poems do — on finding beauty and meaning, even in the face of impermanence.
Every one of the 44 poems here is a gem. What touched me to the core were Jong’s memories and reflections about her dear and extraordinary mother, the painter and designer Eda Mirsky Mann, who lived to the ripe rip-roaring age of 100. These poems filled my eyes with joyful tears as I recalled the courage, laughter, and compassion of my own irreplaceable mom.
Like the brightest literary stars in the soul-dark night skies of modernity — Rumi, Hafez, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Miller, Clarice Lispector, and Mary Oliver — Erica Jong is one of our rare creators who sings “Yes” to life. In this collection she confronts darkness but refuses to succumb, choosing instead the ways of light, humor, passion, and interpersonal connection.
A great poem is a talisman, whose indispensableness comes from its magic powers to heal, hearten, and renew us. As Jong scrumptiously writes in her poem “Your Eggs”:
Poetry is
the most important
meal of the day,
without which
we sicken,
we starve.
Here is a book that might restore our appetites for reading, celebrating, and writing poetry. Read it and reap.
— Michael Pastore