I’ll begin with an apology to Szymborska and her translator Joanna Trzeciak for borrowing, then stamping my snow boot all over one of my favorite poems, “Under a Certain Little Star.”This is what poets do—steal prettily, then admit it and move on. I think it’s best to point to the cloud before beginning a week of blogging, as it leads to a little “all you need to know” introduction of this person who’ll be weaving and opining for the next few days.
I started writing poetry at forty and earned my MFA at Bennington five years ago. This puts me in the group of boomer women who raised a family first and found a vocation later. A bit too young to be part of the second generation of feminism, a bit too old to be part of the first generation of women that feminism benefitted from the cradle to the doctorate, I think of us as living in the selvage between these two generations. And when we get a poem right, we write from that place, the one between the furious indignation of the have-nots and the polished articulateness of the had-more-ofs. (Will the always-hads will be born before the end of the twenty-first century?)
I’m intrigued by demographics and the influence they have on everything from social policy (eg. how the surfeit of boomers enflames the healthcare crisis) to food trends and slang. Why shouldn’t it influence our literature as well? Unlike social policy and slang, though, literature (particularly poetry) goes through a second step—a kind of kiln firing brought about by a generation’s length of time. This hardening by fire gives us the literature that lasts, that which will continue to be read, taught, remembered. I feel freed by feeling this way; my task is simply to write. The legacy business is beyond my control.
What does this have to do with a certain little cloud? It’s the cloud of being in one’s fifties and losing one’s parents that I now labor under. My stepfather, a dignified Yankee doctor, has chosen to die at home after three years of treatment for leukemia. I support his decision and am saying my goodbyes, my gut clenched in an embarrassment of self pity even as I know that birth, breath, and death are all we share. Still, I marvel at the way he has lived his life. I worry that there’ll be less goodness here for the rest of us—for me– when he leaves. This is the nature of my grief, my cloud.
“Comfort me with apples” says one of the Bible’s Songs of Solomon, but in times of emotional hunger, you can best comfort me with elegies. I’m an elegy devotee, from Donne to Dunn. For the last few weeks I’ve been rereading two very different elegies: Jane Kenyon’s elegy of faith and acceptance, “Let Evening Come,” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music,” which rages, denies. Each satisfies; each gives voice to grief’s complications; each is a necessary thing.