Lucia Getsi Retires, in style as usual

Lucia Cordell Getsi -- poet, critic, translator, editor, and professor of great love for her students -- is the woman I met and learned from who made me think: I want to grow up to be like Her. And made me want to grow up Right Now. But not at her feet. Lucia does not place you at her feet. She places you face to face, both on the dais, and then it's all Let's Go from there. The story...The weekend in Normal, IL was just a bit intense. I've not been back in almost ten years, and just driving through town created a nostalgia flood: I used to live right there, that's where I played pool, there's the park I would read in, oh gawd there's my old dorm, there's the house where X lived and our sex was wonderful, and so forth. Fun and terrifying all at once. I'm not the sort of woman who puts her hand over her heart when moved, but I drove through Bloomington and into Normal with hand over heart in that very feminine gesture of openness/protection. That set the tone. Lucia is the one who gave me a copy if Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, saying, "You are the woman who needs to read this book," knowing, as she does, what you need before you do. She reads people well. And she was right. Irigaray felt like the inside of me, only WAY smarter. She's the one who loved my poetry more than I did most of the time and kept opening spaces for it and me to grow into, without really seeming to do that. She a Yoda like quality about her. She's teaching you all the time, and you don't always feel "taught" so much as just delighted at all this new space you want to go gambol around in. She's the one who gave me Rilke and Rimbaud, and Novalis, and it's really hard to say how much. She gave me Trakl. She gave me Graham, saying again, that I'm the one to read it. And I did. And then gave a presentation on Jorie at the end of our European Romanticism course that led up into the PoMo daze (as all that does, of course), and Graham was sort of the capstone of that course. We would sit with food and wine and say things like, "Structuralism makes everything so much the same that nothing matters, and Poststructuralism makes everything so different that nothings matters, and what, my dear, are we going to do about that?" Which was one of the questions from many teachers that has led me to Renaissance 2.0, but about which we had enough sense to crack several vicious jokes, but from which came the ability to spot and weave all the nodes and connections rhizoming around the grid that I'm making now. Bless you all. She's made of tungsten and dresses like an orchid. She's one of those people in my heart that it is simply not possible to honor fully in words, the connection and the freedom are so simultaneously glowingly abyssal and ineffable and nourishing. She knows how to let an other be an other with her. Which may be the highest compliment one can pay.