The Best American Poetry

My Mother by Laura Orem

My mother was very pretty and funny and outgoing and smart and kind. She loved TV mysteries and card games and having fun. She had a voice like chalk on a blackboard, but she sang while she vacuumed or cooked dinner, "Moonlight Becomes You" and "I'm in the Mood for Love" and an 1890s tune called "My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon" that she'd learned from her father who'd spent part of his lost youth in vaudeville. She was a doer, not a dreamer, and she learned to drive in her 40s and took up golf when she was 50 and was interested in everything. Everyone who met her loved her.

She was also the bravest person I ever knew. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was six, and she and her sister were raised by her happy-go-lucky and mostly-unemployed father, who was a failure as a house painter but a rousing success as a parent  (after he died, my mother asked her sister, "Did it ever bother you that I was Dad's favorite?" Her sister looked at her in astonishment and said, "What are you talking about? I was his favorite!"). This was the 1930s, and they were desperately poor and often homeless, camping out on various relatives' couches. In later years, my mother would speak of being so hungry when she came home from school that she'd mix up baking cocoa with water into a paste and eat that. She did very well in school, well enough to graduate early, and wanted to become a nurse, but she couldn't afford college and had to go to work instead. Which she did, on the assembly line at the Bulova Watch Company.  Bitterness had no place in her psyche; she was a champion lemonade-maker.

When she was about 20, she was diagnosed with TB herself. At the time, it was inactive, and she and my father were married in 1943. The disease stayed dormant throughout the war and the birth of her first child, my brother, but in 1950 it came back with a vengeance. She was told she had a choice: she could admit herself to the hospital for treatment - which meant quarantine for an undetermined amount of time - or the state would take her son as a matter of public health. She went to the hospital, and my brother, age three, went to live with her sister. My father worked all day and visited her on Sundays, when the TB patients were allowed visitors. The TB ward was on an upper floor - a locked floor, like a prison - and my brother was too young to be allowed up to see her. Someone would stay with him down below and she would wave to him from a window. She was there for two and a half years.

They thought she was going to die. Her prognosis was "poor," but she would have none of it. "I thought it was ridiculous," she once said to me. She was lucky on two counts:one was the invention of streptomycin, the first antibiotic that was effective against TB, and the other was encountering a British doctor, whose name I do not know, who had developed a new surgery that allowed TB patients to have damaged lung material removed without disfigurement (his procedure "tented" the diaphragm so that the patient could stand upright after surgery, which involved removing ribs). She lost half of one lung and a quarter of the other, and it took 900 stitches to close up the incisions, but she survived.

Eight years later, at the age of 40 and long before it was fashionable, she had me. I do not remember her not being a bit frail physically - she had asthma and later severe osteoporosis - but she was always upbeat and game and joyous. My father died in 1982, but she lived to see her grandchildren, and until her health really began to fail, she kept her sunny spirit. But as she got sicker and sicker, she got angry and unhappy - understandable in a woman who had always overwhelmed her own bad health with sheer will and grit. When she died, after several years of increasing dependence, weakening vision, and a bad fall, she was ready to go. The night before she died, the doctor said, "I'll see you in the morning." She said, "I won't be here" and she wasn't. She had had enough.

I tell people that, while from my father I got poetry, from my mother I got whatever steel I have in my spine. She was terrific. I miss her.

My mother, Dotty, in about 1940.

(Ed. note: This post originally appeared on May 9, 2010

From the Archive: A Poem for Thanksgiving Week (by Laura Orem)

The holiday insanity is upon us again. But instead of stressing out that I'm not Martha Stewart, I've been trying to remember to breathe, and to think about what the holidays are supposed to be about. This is hard to do, when there are stacks of papers to grade, long lines at the post office to stand in, and canned Christmas music at every turn to turn one's thoughts to homicide. But in the way of the universe and before I killed anyone, I came across this lovely poem. It stopped me short with that moment of clarity and recognition that good poems give us, and I wanted to share with you its spirit of gratitude, humor, and grace.

"Starfish"

by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to 
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a 
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have 
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman 
down beside you at the counter who say, Last night, 
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological 
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old 
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it 
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the 
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you 
were born at a good time. Because you were able 
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And 
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland, 
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel, 
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

from Our Post Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande, 2005)

Have a wonderful holiday!

(ed note: This post originally appeared on November 24, 2009)

Headfirst Into The Air (by Laura Orem)

The Olympics are here again, and I can’t rally up much interest. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I keep finding out who won and who lost each event before it’s broadcast (thanks a lot, New York Times). Maybe it’s because, as I’ve written before, there are no characters anymore; everyone is slick, smooth, and tediously decorous. No real drama, not even in the athletic performances, which are uniformly excellent and hinge on the tiniest millisecond.

I used to love to watch the swimming and diving events. I love to swim, even though I’m neither fast nor elegant in form. As for diving, it’s always been a mystery to me how you get good at it without breaking your neck. In fact, I will agree that, even now, of all the summer Olympic sports, diving provides the most suspense, because even a gold-medal diver can misstep or over-rotate, so you catch your breath until she safely slices into the water.

I learned to swim at age five in the Officers Club Pool at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. EA is notorious for two things: LSD experiments on soldiers in the 1960s, and a stockpile of deadly chemical weapons dating back to World War I that they finally disposed of only about ten years ago. My father was a civilian employee who worked on post. We lived in a development a few miles outside the gate, but as a little girl I spent a large chunk of my time on the post grounds themselves.

When I was a kid, no one talked about the tripped-out soldiers or the weapons stockpile; I’m not sure how much of it was publically known in the late sixties. There were “deadly force” areas tucked into remote corners, but they were largely invisible and you had actively go find them. For me, the post was a wonderful place, with shady, tree-lined streets, and deer so tame they’d walk right up to your parked car. There was a riding stable with horses you could pet, and a small airfield where, each 4^th of July, the Rec. folks put on a carnival complete with pony rides, a tiny ferris wheel with four cars, and about twenty-five ramshackle booths. You bought a bunch of tickets for five cents apiece, then you made your rounds. There was Pitch-Til-U-Win, where, if your aim was good and you were lucky, you could win yourself a small pink plastic poodle with sparkling blue eyes, and even if you weren’t, you’d at least end up with a Hawaiian lei made of paper flowers. There was the Wheel-of-Fortune, where if you were very very lucky, you could walk off with a stuffed dog with vinyl ears, and the Pick-a-Duck game, where you could win a straw hat. There was the Spin-Art booth, where you poured primary-colored tempera paint out of Tupperware ketchup bottles onto a piece of spinning cardboard and got your own work of art to hang up on your wall. The air was redolent with sizzling hot dogs (for the kids) and pit-beef sandwiches (for the grownups), and for dessert you had your choice of snowballs or cotton candy. Then, as darkness fell, your dad got the blanket from the car, and the whole family, smelling now of OFF bug spray, headed down to the grass field by the runway to swat mosquitoes and watch the fireworks.

My Mistress' Ipad is Nothing Like the Sun (by Laura Orem)

So you're sitting in an airport, waiting for your flight and jonesing for some poetry. Guess what - there's an app for that! Touch Press has announced Shakespeare's Sonnets for Ipad. At $13.99, it's expensive, but worth it. The app includes performances of all 154 sonnets, facsimiles of the original text, notes, and commentary, along with other gadgets and functions. In other words, hours of fun for the poetry-minded.

Here's a sample: Patrick Stewart reading Sonnet 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes").

 

 

The sonnets are read by David Tennant, Kim Cattrall, and Jemma Redgrave, among others. My only gripe with this app is that the wonderful Stephen Fry only reads one selection: Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"). Here it is:

 

This is not Touch Press' first foray into poetry. They previously released an app for The Waste Land.

 

Good-bye, Celeste Holm, 1917-2012 (by Laura Orem)

The great character actress, Celeste Holm, died this past weekend at age 95. Miss Holm was a fixture in the acting world for more than six decades. The first Ado Annie in Oklahoma, she famously won the part when she demonstrated for Rodgers and Hammerstein her ability at hog-calling. In 1948, she received an Oscar for her performance as Anne Dettrey in the social drama about anti-Semitism, Gentleman's Agreement, and was nominated twice more, for Come to the Stable (1949) and All About Eve (1950). She more than held her own against Frank Sinatra in 1956's High Society. She performed extensively on Broadway and later, on television, including a recurring role in the 1980s nighttime melodrama, Falcon Crest. She was one of those wonderful actresses who can do almost anything.

But I remember her chiefly and most fondly for her role as the Fairy Godmother in the 1965 television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. It was a yearly event awaited with great anticipation at my house, and even now, I can sing most of the score at the drop of the hat. Here's "Impossible," with Lesley Anne Warren as Cinderella. Good-bye, Miss Holm, and thanks for making this little girl happy.

 

Laura Orem Presents a Poem by Jim Valvis

How many poems can you name that explore the complicated relationship between fathers and sons? There are a lot. Some of the best and most-well known are Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"; Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"; and Ray Carver's "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year". These poems all explore the relationship with tenderness, even when the father's faults and limitations are patently obvious. How much more difficult is it to write without descending into inarticulate rage and grief when the relationship was fraught with violence and abuse?

Mark Doty, in an interview with Bill Moyers in Fooling With Words, has said, "I might write a poem which begins in raw and inchoate feeling. Most of my poems do begin that way. They come tumbling out of me, but that's a cry, not a poem...I have to stand back from them and begin to shape the language so that the poem becomes available to another person. You must stand at a distance from yourself and apply all the resources you can muster to the raw stuff of experience. It's not easy, especially when you are writing about the hardest things in the world, which is what poetry must do ultimately." That's the trick, isn't it - standing back far enough to shape experience into poetry. It's bloody hard, especially when psychic and physical trauma are the experience. It requires a poet with significant writing chops and great artistic maturity.

Jim Valvis, in his poem "The Pause," has done it. "The Pause" moves through emotional shifts effortlessly and with gut-wrenching effect.

"The Pause"

Reading a collection of poems about abuse,
blurbs noting the poet's brilliance and bravery,
the hated father attacking the poet's I narrator,
the self-pity mummified in metaphor,
it occurs to me: the poet's father is an angel
compared to mine.  So my mind reaches back,
and I see my dad, drunk and handsome,
eyes bloodshot and face red and roiling with rage,
drawing his belt from his waist, the sound
hissing like a snake. What have I done this time?
No matter.  I'm incapable of being too disobedient.
I tiptoe through life as if I have glass feet
and one stubbed toe will shatter me.
Once the beating begins, there's yelling,
his screeching, and my pathetic promises
to be better, though who recalls the exact words
as the belt impacts, as it smacks flesh
and births blood worms that puff the skin?
No, all you hear is the buzz,
the bee stings of leather
as you raise your arm like a thin white flag.
There isn't any poetry there, or even sense,
until-- a pause, some plea
scraping though the slush of his soused mind,
the belt stayed, still cocked over his head,
like Zeus holding a brown bolt of lightning,
or a Homeric hero hacking off the tail of Cerberus.
My father's eyes clear, then cloud again
with doubt, despair, disbelief
that he's become no better than his own father,
a circle realizing he's run and run,
and traveled nowhere.  It's just a flicker.
Then the belt is busy again, the rage greater
for the doubt, the sadness, the connection.
Yet when I look up at him, and think of him now,
I see him not as failed father
but fallen fighter. Though I admit
I'm neither brilliant nor brave.  He could've killed me
and I'd have found a way to love him anyway.

 

Look at the tonal shifts. The poems begins with the speaker "Reading a collection of poems about abuse" with a kind of sarcastic bravado: "The poet's father was an angel/compared to mine." This works on several levels, most importantly to lure the reader in. Would we have the courage to continue if the poem began with the beating? Maybe not. But we are there when the tone shifts, when the speaker slides backwards in time to face his drunken, raging father, "drawing his belt from his waist/the sound hissing like a snake," and then the question, "What have I done this time?"  The answer is, of course, nothing: "I'm incapable of being too disobedient." The description of the terrible beating - so easy to turn into that cry Doty speaks of - instead is a horrifically precise tableau where "there isn't any poetry there, or even sense,"  culminating in the moment of insight for both the father and the son when "my father's eyes clear, then cloud again/with doubt, despair, disbelief/that he's become no better than his own father/a circle realizing he's run and run,/and traveled nowhere." Then, of course, "the belt is busy again, the rage greater/for the doubt, the sadness, the connection."

The poem's crux is the link between the then and now: "Yet when I look up at him, and think of him now,/ I see him not as a failed father/but a fallen fighter." Then those devastating last lines: "He could have killed me,/and I'd have found a way to love him anyway." There is a masterful blending here of the boy who was and the man who is. We don't change into different beings as we age. The boy is with the man always. And compare the ending of this poem with its beginning. We have moved from an exterior, protective sarcasm to the deeply vulnerable expression of love for an completely unloveable man. 

This is one of those poems that stays with you for a long time. It does, as Mark Doty says, what poetry is supposed to do: it takes on "the hardest things in the world" and turns them into art.

"The Pause" has appeared in both Fictionaut and Gargoyle. Jim's collection, How to Say Goodbye (Aortic Books, 2011) is available here.

Good-bye, Carrie Smith

Oh, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off!

Take a Load Off, Levon, and Rest in Peace

Levon Helm, 1940-2012

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April 15, 1912

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Convergence of the Twain

by  Thomas Hardy

 (Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

  

I

     In a solitude of the sea

     Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

 II

     Steel chambers, late the pyres

     Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

 III

     Over the mirrors meant

     To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

 IV

     Jewels in joy designed

     To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

 V

     Dim moon-eyed fishes near

     Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?". . .

 VI

     Well: while was fashioning

     This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

 VII

     Prepared a sinister mate

     For her--so gaily great--

A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

 VIII

     And as the smart ship grew

     In stature, grace, and hue

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

 IX

     Alien they seemed to be:

     No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history.

 X

     Or sign that they were bent

     By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one August event,

 XI

     Till the Spinner of the Years

     Said "Now!" And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.