Poetry Will Save Your Life
Page 8
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When my son is in seventh or eighth grade he is asked to choose a Shakespeare sonnet, memorize it, and share it with his class. He chooses Sonnet 29. A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem that rhymes in a particular pattern. Listening for the rhyme can, on the first or second reading, obscure the meaning, but it also makes a sonnet an easier poetic form to memorize. In Shakespeare’s hand, the sonnets have a symmetrical beauty and are an expression of an inner argument, a way of thinking. Ostensibly about courtly romance, the sonnets were formally published in 1609 and there are 154 all together. Sonnets 1–126 address a young man and the rest a woman and chart the narrative of a love affair. How can a poem written in the seventeenth century still feel present? Perhaps it is because though time progresses, our inner emotions remain constant. As I listen to my son recite the sonnet, I remember the early years of my life when I wished for a more stable home, for my mother’s happiness, for another girl’s “art” and “scope,” and can recall the horrible sting of my envy. “Confession” by Louise Glück, a short free-verse poem of eleven lines, turns that wish on its head by documenting the flipside: What it felt like to be the object of another’s envy.
“Confession” in its short lines packs an emotional wallop. Glück, an American poet, is known for her technical precision and sharp insights into family relationships. “The Confession” expresses the subversive and uncomfortable feeling of being the object of envy. It explains the reason I kept my new sweater hidden in a drawer.
Both Sonnet 29 and “Confession,” written centuries apart, invoke in the reader a sense of identification. Are the poems sprung from personal experience? Or an attempt to achieve universality? Or a combination of both? In answer to whether a poem is born from personal experience Louise Glück has said: “In saying to write, you’re going to write that which most concerns you, which most quickens your mind, and then to turn those subjects over with as resourceful and complex a touch as possible. I am endlessly irritated by the reading of my poems as autobiography. I draw on the materials my life has given me, but what interests me isn’t that they happen to me, what interests me is that they seem, as I look around, paradigmatic. We’re all born mortal. We have to contend with the idea of mortality. We all, at some point, love, with the risks involved, the vulnerabilities involved, the disappointments and great thrills of passion. This is common human experience, so what you use is the self as a laboratory, in which to practice, master, what seem to you central human dilemmas.”
SEXUALITY
THE SISTERS OF SEXUAL TREASURE
Sharon Olds
My best friend and I carouse around our neighborhood in her father’s Cadillac, dubbed the “cruise mobile.” We are fifteen. My friend’s mother had a nervous breakdown when we were in elementary school and never fully recovered. My own mother is in a fragile state. We long to escape the constricting quiet and ennui in our homes. We stop for gas at a Sohio filling station. Two boys, older, maybe eighteen or nineteen, are in a blue Corvette across the pump from ours, and we notice, the way teenagers do, that they are looking. They’re different from the boys who live in our neighborhood, less clean-cut and preppy, and maybe that’s what attracts us. When one gets out of the car, I notice a bandana in the back pocket of his jeans, and when he leans over the car to push the nozzle into the gas tank, a sliver of white skin between where his jeans and T-shirt meet. He is tall and muscular. Of the two, he is the one I like. Maybe because in the dark of the night, in the restless boredom of our lives, any boy different from the pack we run with will do. Maybe all we want in that moment is not to care at all. It takes up too much energy to care.
My friend is bolder. She steps out of the car and lights up a cigarette. The other boy gets out of the car and begins to talk to her and then I get out too and the driver pumping the gas comes over, lifts his chin, and says, “Hey.” We banter back and forth and then we are in their car, leaving my girlfriend’s father’s car in the gas station parking lot, heading to the 7-Eleven for beer. The night is suddenly dangerous, alive with possibility. The air outside the open window feels different—crisper, with an edge. I observe the driver next to me, watch his hand reach for the gearshift, the way his cheeks are sunken in, the muscle in his arm as he leans his elbow out the open window. We find a secluded spot to park underneath one of the weeping willow trees facing the duck pond and pop open our beer cans, everything quiet for a moment save the sound of the air as it escapes. The beer tastes cold and harsh and later hot as it slides down my throat. My friend is in the backseat with one boy and I am in the front with the one I like. The driver slides a cassette into the chamber of his car’s tape deck and we listen to “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Joker,” and “Free Bird” and time disappears. Who knows or remembers what we talked about. I don’t even remember their names. All we want is the boys’ lips on ours, tasting like warm sour beer, and their rough hands on our hot skin. It isn’t until later that night, under the nubby covers in my bed, watching the shadows of the oak tree make strange shapes on my wall, replaying the night in my mind, that it occurs to me that we might have put ourselves in danger.
THE SISTERS OF SEXUAL TREASURE
Sharon Olds (1942–)
As soon as my sister and I got out of our
mother’s house, all we wanted to
do was fuck, obliterate
her tiny sparrow body and narrow
grasshopper legs. The men’s bodies
were like our father’s body! The massive
hocks, flanks, thighs, elegant
knees, long tapered calves—
we could have him there, the steep
forbidden
buttocks, backs of the knees, the cock
in our mouth, ah the cock in our mouth.
Like explorers who‚
discover a lost city, we went‚
nuts with joy, undressed the men‚
slowly and carefully, as if
uncovering buried artifacts that
proved our theory of the lost culture:
that if Mother said it wasn’t there,
it was there.
* * *
This unrepressed, fiery, erotic poem captures the subversive pleasure of becoming an independent, sexual being. Two teenage sisters discover the power of seduction and the pleasures of having sex and, in doing so, they obliterate the constraints and oppression of their mother and her expectations. This is a poem of liberation and the sexual act as release. When asked in an interview why she writes poems, Sharon Olds said, “You know when you have something that you long to say to someone, and you could never say it to them, to their face? Then here’s a place where you could speak.” Indeed, “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure” represents what is sayable perhaps only in poetry. It allows us to think about taboo emotions by pushing the envelope. Does Olds mean literally that she wants to sleep with her father? Or is she saying that a young girl’s sexuality is at some level tied up with the father? The father in the poem becomes archetypal. He is all of our fathers. The daughters must prove their existence or their right to exist as separate beings from their mother by doing something they think she would disapprove of. The poem tells a classic story of teenage and adolescent rebellion, but what dwells underneath is complex and mysterious. When I discover “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure,” it brings back the night in that Corvette with those boys we never saw again, and all the other nights in the dark cars, movie theaters, and dim basements of my teenage years.
ESCAPE
SYMPATHY
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
In the early 1970s, the Vietnam War and America’s involvement in it are in full throttle. When the Kent State shootings happen an hour away from Cleveland, I am a teenager and my mother is in her late thirties. My mother is single again. The world is changing, but we seem to be living in our own little stagnant capsule, where everything depends upon the illusion of well-being. I feel a revolution happening inside me too, but at the time I don’t know what it mean
s. It is a growing impatience and hostility toward my mother and her dependence on men. Now that she’s divorced, she’s ready to start dating again, but this time there is desperation in the enterprise.
It begins sometimes a week before, when she picks us up from school in her yellow Comet and makes a quick detour to May Company or Higbee’s department store before taking us home. By the time she explores the sales racks of dresses, tries on countless pairs of high heels, stops at the make-up counter to sample the vast array of lipsticks, eye shadows, and mascaras, searching for the perfect combination of outfit and accessories, my sisters and I are exhausted and impatient, our stomachs growling. Besides, we have homework to do, tests to study for, plays to rehearse. And there is a war raging in another country, killing people; there are antiwar protests, black-power uprisings, and feminist movements. Even where I go to school a rebellion has begun. Students are experimenting with LSD and other drugs and sit in class stoned out of their minds. When I leave school, I catch whiffs of marijuana smoke in the air. The world is changing, but inside my home everything is stagnant. Why can’t my mother wake up? When she’s in this state it is as if the world has stopped outside our door. We have witnessed, before my mother remarried, a string of men come into our home to pick her up. And at the end of the night we’ve watched her return disillusioned. None of them seems worthy of her care and attention. Watching her looking into the cosmetic mirror, making that face that isn’t her face, I feel trapped. Desperate to escape my mother’s fate.
I no longer want to be pigeonholed, to be the pitied daughter of a desperate widow and divorcée with few options. I fear if I can’t escape, I’ll wind up like my mother and always wear the shameful badge of my upbringing. I work at a bakery counter after school, then later waitress and babysit, saving every cent I can for college. All I want is to be set free.
SYMPATHY
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
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Paul Dunbar was one of the first African American poets to gain wide recognition. His parents were freed slaves from Kentucky when he was born, and in his work, Dunbar drew upon their experience as slaves living on a plantation. In high school, he published his poems in the Dayton Herald but he did not have money to attend college and took a job as an elevator operator. He eventually moved to Chicago in hopes of getting a job at the World’s Fair, and there he befriended Frederick Douglass, who found him a job as a clerk and arranged for him to read from his poetry. The speaker in “Sympathy” empathizes with the bird locked in its cage, unable to explore the outside world. It no doubt reflects the poet’s history, the son of former slaves, and of being confined by its legacy, enduring a pain that “still throbs in the old, old scars.” But a reader can enter the poem with his or her own experience. For a young girl, it might exemplify the experience of being trapped by her parenthood, her surroundings, or by living in the wake of patriarchy. It resounds with the desire to be let loose, free, though it is not “a carol of joy and glee,” because the bird’s former suffering cannot be denied.
Maya Angelou drew inspiration from this poem and took a portion of it for the title of her acclaimed and widely read autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a classic coming-of-age narrative about enduring bigotry and trauma in the South.
FIRST LOVE
BRIGHT STAR
John Keats
A BLESSING
James Wright
I first witness the drama of improbable and quixotic attraction in sentimental movies like Love Story, which we view one wintry Sunday at the Vogue movie theater in the shopping mall, three sisters crying into our coat sleeves at the sad ending, and also in novels like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced – Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it,” John Keats, the Romantic poet, wrote in a now-famous letter to his brother and sister, “The Vale of Soul Making.”
It happens when I am a senior in high school. I am at a party and in through the door he walks, wearing jeans and a wool pullover sweater, with brown thin hair tied back in a ponytail, dark hazel eyes, and chiseled cheekbones. Seeing the way he looks at me across the room, blood rushes through my veins, and I feel the way I do when sun scorches my face. His family has a big house in the country. They own two dogs, several cats, and on their properties is a barn with three horses. In addition, his father owns race horses he boards at the local harness-racing track. He tells me that he wants to become a vet and then later he changes his mind and aspires to be a harness-racing driver. When I am off my shift at the coffee shop where I wait tables, he comes by and picks me up in his blue jeep with its plastic windows, flapped open, rattling in the wind, and we spend afternoons walking through the woods near his home or trailing a creek and weekends at the racetrack where he has a job as a groom. Summer nights, after the races, I sometimes sleep with him in the track’s dark tack room on a thin cot, the floors and walls cement, smelling like horse hair, but I don’t care. When I go away to college my first year, I feel as if I’ve forgotten something. He is at loose ends, taking time off from college and still working at the track back home where he cleans stalls, grooms, and hand walks the horses hoping for a shot at becoming a driver. There is one black pay phone in the hall of our dorm and every time it rings my heart jumps, hoping it’s him. One day, after I’ve almost gotten used to his absence, as if it’s become its own muscle, and I’ve become strangely attracted to another student in my philosophy class—he’s analytical and slightly full of himself, but nevertheless we take long walks together engaging in philosophical discussions about the texts we are reading—he surprises me and drives from Cleveland to Vermont and knocks on my dorm room door. My body comes alive like a Christmas tree all lit up. We drive through the snowy small towns in Vermont, stopping for a lunch of grilled cheese, tomato, and sprout sandwiches in a health-food store that smells of grains and vitamins. We spend the night freezing under a thin duvet in a cheap bed-and-breakfast. In the morning, freshly baked muffins and coffee await us as we walk down the creaky stairs before making the journey back to campus. In the car, he talks about us getting a little house together in Vermont with a barn and horses he could train after I graduate and growing our own vegetables and living off the land, the simple life, but the closer we get to the college where I will soon return to my dorm room and classes and he’ll begin the long trek back to Cleveland, something shifts. I notice things about him I hadn’t seen before. I can’t share with him my growing interest in ideas and books. Around him I’m almost mute. His hair is too long and stringy. Dirt from the track is still in his nails, and he seems without ambition, whereas my mind’s been turned on by the books I’ve been reading for my classes, and suddenly I can’t contain all my ideas and wants; but still there is thi
s attraction between us. I wish for time to stop so that nothing between us will alter, but our individual aspirations draw us further apart.
Nevertheless, for a decade, not a day goes by when I do not think about him or wish things could be different. I wonder, why do we love who we love? Why does love die? There is a fierce irrational attachment between us. I can’t stand to think of him upset or hurt, and the thought of him with someone else is unbearable, even though when we are together it doesn’t feel right and within days, sometimes weeks, together we break up. Just when I believe I’m over him, he shows up again unannounced, and it begins all over again. In this romantic sonnet the poet longs for the state of bliss to remain and never change.
BRIGHT STAR
John Keats (1795–1821)
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
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The poet John Keats died in 1821, just twenty-five years old and largely unknown. Years after his death, his genius was belatedly recognized and he is now considered among the greatest English poets. “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things,” he wrote, and its guiding light informs his poetry. In 1818, as a struggling young poet, he fell in love with Fanny Brawne. She is the “bright star” of this poem.