The Best American Poetry

Significant Mother (by Joy Katz)

A regular column on poetry and motherhood

It's Monday, and I'm tired of being a woman poet.

I was on a panel at AWP in Chicago about women-centered mentorship and influence.

The new anthology that inspired the panel, Efforts & Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship, is edited brilliantly by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker. I'm pleased to have been included in it. Way more than pleased: excited. The book makes a wise mentor for writers starting out, and it's an enticing mucking about inside the minds of contemporary poets.

But so here's what happened. Five contributors — Kristin Prevallet, Beth Ann Fennelly, Valerie Martinez, Erika Meitner, and yours truly — read portions of our essays from the anthology. (Mine is about Sharon Olds and her first book, Satan Says.) Then we answered questions. A young woman asked whether it was important to have a female mentor. I said that to me it didn't make a difference. I learned the most important thing about writing poetry from my community workshop teacher — a man named Michael Wurster — and a different crucial lesson, about the morality of imagination, from Sharon Olds. Not that what I learned from Olds I could have gotten from Wurster, but I didn't learn what I learned from Olds because she is a woman.

Others on the panel made interesting comments about having female mentors in particular. Among other things, they learned from them how to balance children, teaching, and the writing life. A couple of panelists discussed the time they spent mentoring female students about how to lead their lives as poets. The great care and time they described putting in impressed me. Then it depressed me.

In a job interview last year I'd mentioned my home life. Chance was a few months old; we'd just adopted him. You're expected to be the students' Literary Mama, someone on the search committee said. To be in your office, there for them, all the time.

I resolved not to mention my kid again in future interviews, a mistake that caused me to be perceived as unavailable.

But if I were a Literary Mama, or L.M., wouldn't my having a child interest my students, both male and female? Not only because I'm writing poems and essays and teaching classes and charing committees while also being a parent, but because my young son is one of the shaping forces of my recent poems? (I say "shaping force" because time and consciousness are the subjects of the poems, not the baby. But now I'm conscious of trying to make clear that I do not make Bad Baby Art. Oh, I'm tired of being a woman poet.) 

Were my potential male colleagues at that college Literary Papas? I wonder if, as L.P.s, they manifest the devotion and log the hours that my fellow panelists described when they talked about mentoring female students. I wonder whether such mentoring is always a good thing for the mentor.

How much energy does such deep and sustained role modeling take from our own writing? Is it good for the writing? As men. As women. Well yes especially as women.

Significant Mother (by Joy Katz)

George Oppen: Significant Father?

Did George Oppen renounce poetry for 25 years for the sake of fatherhood?

Apparently. At least in part.

Oppen's hiatus is better known for its political impetus. ("There are situations which cannot be honorably met by art," he said in the mid-1930s, when he devoted himself to the Communist party.) But he later explained that, besides pressures of "conscience," there were "things...I had to try out—and it was more than politics, really; it was...having a child...."

It's interesting to think about that statement in light of women artists, who in the first wave of feminism were under pressure not to have kids. A recent article in The Brooklyn Rail argues that the pressure is there still. The author, artist Sharon Butler, cites the early feminists' disdain of the "idiosyncratic, excessively inward-looking 'baby art'" that comes after childbearing. If the women "get their wits about them," the thinking went, they eventually returned "to their previous, more serious work." I'll just let that last sentence hang in the air. 

Despite more women artists having kids and making art having to do with childbearing and children,and despite the art increasingly appearing in leading galleries, Butler says, art dealers who don't have children tend to neglect artists who do.

How much was that the case in poetry in the '70s, and how much is it the case today, in academia and among editors?

In the months after we adopted our son, when I worried about not writing, my friend Marcella Durand, who also had just adopted, mentioned that she was trying to give herself a full year's break. Although I feel certain she wrote during that time, the idea was that she wouldn't worry if she didn't. It seemed revolutionary, and it freed me. 

Oppen said that he never stopped thinking of himself as a poet during his hiatus. That seems revolutionary, too.  

(Thanks to Marcella for first pointing out the article.)

Emily Dickinson Called Back: She's in a Band

By Joy Katz

My favorite piece in "Lightning at our feet," a multimedia performance based on Emily Dickinson's work as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, didn't have any words at all. 

Bare tree branches in a black-and-white, nearly abstract pattern appeared on layers of screens behind a young woman holding a metronome. The only music was the machine's loud tick-ticking, first in the familiar iambic meter of a Dickinson poem and then falling into a kind of arrythmia, as though a huge mechanical heart had lurched out of control. In the darkened theater the red light on the metronome shone first on the girl's face and then, terrifyingly, her heart; it moved for a moment to her hands, like the passion of Christ. The ticking sped up; the light flashed; now the girl was holding a bomb.

If I had entered the theater knowing nothing and were shown only this part, I would have guessed it was an Emily Dickinson poem.

Lots of contemporary composers indulge in "settings" of poems that have nothing to do with the poems. Their music is like dry white plates lying underneath appetizers floating in air. But composer Michael Gordon and music director Ted Hearne turned Dickinson's words into real live song lyrics. The four singer/musicians (Jennifer Charles, lead singer of the band Elysian Fields; Leah Coloff; Courtney Orlando; Bora Yoon) actually could tour as a band called the Emily Dickinsons, doing brainy jazzy beautiful weird ambient electronica in their sharp frocks and mod trenchcoats. The poems felt like these performers' urgent utterances (even if it was sometimes hard to hear the words). If the band toured with the rolling scrims featuring, among other images, Dickinson's handwriting, which rose like smoke to surround singer Jennifer Charles, so much the better. 

Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison in 2002 made the ethereal film Decasia, with found footage of decomposing silent movies. The dreaminess of their vision and that of projectionist Laurie Olinder suits Dickinson, allowing for intuitive translations of the poems such as the one above. In another memorable piece, three cell phones rotate on an old LP, lighting up randomly. "I went to Heaven," a voice sings over and over, as if Dickinson were placing dropped calls from the beyond. The singers' white dresses were wired for sound. When they turned around, you could see tiny green lights blinking beneath the fabric. It was fantastic, as if they were part lightning bug, or secret robots.

Disappointingly, the visuals too often evinced a superficial idea of Dickinson wandering endlessly through the woods in a bun and a white dress. At times the performers sang in breathy, wispy voices, as if they would at any moment break off into mad cackles, and as if the essence of Dickinson poems were a thread unraveling from a sweater. That's a pity. Dickinson was a recluse, not a shrinking violet, and not the crazy girl on the playground. Even what you could call her nature poems are made of steel and rock, not soft stuff; they flinch from nothing. Reading them you know the poet is looking death, heaven, pain, and delight straight in the eye. If Ridge Theater, where the piece originated, had invited a poet to collaborate with the dramaturg, there might have been swords, garnets, dendrites, or atoms among the flora. 

On balance, though, wherever Emily Dickinson is, I think she leveled her gaze on this performance based on her work and was deeply pleased.

Significant Mother (by Joy Katz)

A regular column on poetry and motherhood

Part Three: Robert Hass, Significant Father

I have always admired Robert Hass for the women in his poems. They are more beautiful for their midlife repose and lined faces and undimmed by frank humanness, even while clipping their nails. Now I find myself recalling every instance of his children in his poems. There aren't many. Hass doesn't write poems about fatherhood in the way that, say, Rachel Zucker or Sylvia Plath or Muriel Rukeyser (in the remarkable "Nine Poems for the Unborn Child") write about motherhood. In fact he doesn't write about fatherhood. Children are one of the many weights in his poems tying language and ideas to earth, landscape, home. Yet those lines come back to me again and again when I'm with the baby.

The opening of "On the Coast Near Sausalito," the first poem in his first book, Field Guide, makes me laugh:

I won't say much for the sea
except that it was, almost,
the color of sour milk.

Almost the color of sour milk? I'd always liked that image but never quite got it. It turns out Hass wrote the poem as a graduate student at the University of Buffalo, when his kids were babies. I didn't put it all together until one morning at 6 a.m. recently as I was dumping out a bottle of milk. Suddenly I understood it—the color of that sky! But also Hass inventing the metaphor as he emptied a bottle into a sink somewhere in Buffalo, where my mother, coincidentally, was rinsing out my own bottles at roughly the same time.

In "Songs to Survive the Summer" (from Praise):

...the gray-eyed child

who said to my child: "Let's play
in my yard. It's O.K.,
my mother's dead.

This bit of overheard conversation feels exactly right to me. It's neither sweet nor grave, despite the subject matter. It captures the seriousness of children at play (people often think children laugh when they play; that's mostly not the case). There's also the idea of permission, the strongest force in a child's life. And the sweet/sad release that comes after a parent dies, when it's neither possible nor necessary anymore to ask "is it O.K. if...?" I remember when I felt that freedom for the first time, some months after my mother died. Hass makes me see that that understanding is not exclusively the province of adults. 

In "Late Spring," from Human Wishes:

...and after dark in the first cool hours, your children sleep so heavily in their beds exhausted from play, it is a pleasure to watch them.

This is a long, dreamy prose poem about a time of year and a neighborhood. I first read it in my late 20s, when I had no thought yet of children. I had a sense-memory of how heavy my own limbs were after I'd played all day with my cousins. Now, when I carry my son upstairs at the end of the day, I can feel the labor of his play. And it turns out that the largest part of being a parent is just watching. 

There's an excellent exchange between a mother and a teenage daughter in "Tahoe in August." You'll have to look that one up yourself. (The mother in the poem is probably Sharon Olds, with whom Hass teaches during the summer at Squaw Valley.)

Scarves (by Joy Katz)

  We've had a cold week in New York City, though after living for many years in the snow belt, it always seems to me that people here overreact to the first sign of winter.  Out come the heavy coats, the woolen hats, the fleece-lined boots and the temperature hasn't even dipped below freezing.  At least those quilted down jackets are out of style.  They made one look, as one fashion reporter wrote, "like a walking hand-grenade."

This morning, while digging through my closet for a scarf (how did I accumulate so many?), I was reminded of Joy Katz's poem, which first appeared in Verse 21:1.  Thank you, Joy.  

Scarves

In the bazaar of a distant country, you can try on a scarf and consider yourself in a handmirror. What is as easy and agreeable, far from home, as a silk square printed with hounds and birds and seated people? Walking along, thinking of the color of it tucked in your bag, is like remembering the Hindi word for “dog” just when you need it.  

Wearing a scarf is another matter. One feels self-conscious as an oil painting bought to match upholstery.  

At the accessories counters of department stores, scarves mass like drunk slatterns. One of them learns the color of your suit and offers a perfunctory comment on it, or “picks up,” as they say, like a pup picks up fleas, the color of your eyes.  

Don’t hate yourself for being easily flattered. Think of French starlets, their heads wrapped carefully as loaves. Pretend they’re in your closet and not driving off in cream-colored convertibles.

                                                           by Joy Katz

--sdh

Significant Mother (by Joy Katz)

A regular column on poetry and motherhood

Part Two: The Secret Reason Why New Parents Don't Write

Shortly after I finished a Stegner Fellowship, some years ago, a former workshop poet and I were trading news about our colleagues. One of them had just had twins. "Well," he said, "that's the end of HER life." A mean-spirited comment for sure, but I forgive him because he had no idea what he was talking about (it's not his fault; maybe no one without a baby could imagine it), and because I've become more philosophical since becoming a parent.

What he was talking about, besides writing, was: applying for grants, taking big literary administrative jobs across the country on short notice, going to residencies and conferences, et cetera. He meant that she was off the landscape, like a cactus at Los Alamos after the Trinity blast.

It's true that people raising young kids don't have a lot of time. But that's not why they don't write. The reason they don't write much, at least at first, is that they are in stupid, staggering, consuming love.

It's late, you're up holding the baby, your wrists are sore from holding the baby so his head won't fall backward and snap off, but you don't notice. You don't notice because you're studying the curve of his lips. Your free hour (there are free hours, and fifteen-minute periods) is all infused with joy, a narcotic bliss tinged with a fresh and alarming sense of danger and mortality. A good thing to write about, maybe. (Sometimes someone gives you the break you've been dying for and takes the baby for ten minutes — then you might not write because your wrists are throbbingly sore.)

Pretty soon the baby is older and crawling and you can't stop watching the way his knees propel him forward, and everything in the room takes on a different scale owing to this new proportion, and the sounds he makes are like moths batting themselves into the furniture and into the deadly hot light and you spend your time mostly keeping him alive, and in your free hour you stare out the window and think of the sounds he makes.

As for the jobs and conferences, the new parent is not a cooked cactus in the poetry landscape. She is like trinitite, the radioactive green glass the sand at Los Alamos turned into. In other words, still there, and with a long half life.

But being in love, and that disruption of one's writing life, is something any writer can empathize with, even my erstwhile poet-colleague.

Significant Mother [by Joy Katz]

Part I: Rage

By Joy Katz

This is the first installment of a series on the subject of poetry and motherhood.

It is not, I promise, a forum for gratuitous cute kid pix, but — by way of introduction — here is my son, Chance, age 16 months. He's central to my thoughts in this space, so I felt you should admire him. More truthfully, I hope you might, by dint of the picture, imagine how madly I love him. That way, when I talk about the link between poetry, motherhood, and rage, you won't be alarmed.

Rage being a possible portal to violence. Violence and motherhood? That's not what I mean; don't click your browser button.

Since we adopted Chance, when he was three months old, I have felt, in rare moments, an extreme kind of rage. I've never had to suppress a stronger feeling. It happened most often when I put him down to nap after a long morning and he woke up screaming a few minutes later.

It was connected with exhaustion, but why the Spear of Rage appeared isn't important. This isn't a forum for self-analysis.

The magnitude of the feeling was humbling, awe-inspiring, surely a form of the sublime Thomas Jefferson talks about*. I'm interested in the suppression of rage, in the very human act — maybe we're at our most human in these moments — of controlling such feelings, of not acting out of them. I can imagine a poem about this. A poem about rage but that also somehow rages, so the reader could feel (or I could feel, in the reading of it) a trace of the feeling I'm talking about.

I can't find any poems like this. There are great hate poems. There are poems of anger, there are angry poems, great angry poets (and many many not-great). There are poems that make mention of rage. There are poems of outrage, of course: I don't find outrage interesting at all. Perhaps dance and painting are more natural forums for the most unwieldy feelings. It's easy to imagine a rageful piece by Mark Morris (best of all, it would surely also be witty). I sense something more than outrage or anger in Kara Walker.

*I'm certain the rage is connected with the rapture of being a parent.

Leaving New York: An Experiment [by Joy Katz]

This week we welcome guest blogger Joy Katz.  Joy Katz is the author, most recently, of The Garden Room. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son and teaches poetry writing at The New School and NYU.  Thanks, Joy.  -- sdh

I have come to St Louis for the summer. From here, my life in New York seems a box I can’t possibly stuff myself back into. A diorama, with one glass wall to slide on and off. In it: light, shallow furniture; a plant with its leaves pressed against the wall; kitchen cabinets full of watchsprings; little, little crowds with bits of colored glass for eyes and tiny silver sneakers; a bit of playground peace in a lucky hour after rain. When you live in New York, and you write, say, or paint, or compose music, you slide the balsa cover over this box and get busy making art, with your hammer and tweezers. Then out you come, bigger than life, huge on the sidewalk, in your sharp hat and sneakers.

Lots of people asked why we (my husband and I, with the baby and the dog) were going to St Louis. For the summer. (There was always that full stop, because summer is the punchline. It’s hot in St Louis, if you don’t know it.)

If you say you’re moving to New York, no one will ask why. “How exciting!” people say, or they shyly admit, “I could never do that.” These responses are extremely gratifying. Moving to New York is like getting engaged to someone famous and foreign. Well, obviously you’re hooking up! You’ve got a tall, intimidating amour, older, with a hard-surfaced, solid glamour. Well done.

But on the eve of my departure from San Francisco, ten years ago, an acquaintance—lifetime resident of the West Village—said on the phone, “why are you moving to New York? It’s hard here.”

One: what did she mean, “hard here?” How could it be harder than San Francisco, a city just as expensive as New York, but with no vacant apartments, and with no parking spots, but the lousy BART, and just ten taxicabs? Two: Did I ask? I did not ask. I was moving to New York because I had worked there for two summers at Parnassus and discovered a city where everyone talked as fast as I did and walked as fast as I did. I had, I knew, found my people. They were anxious. Intense. They weren’t like the people anywhere else I had ever lived.

But before I left for Manhattan that first time, in graduate school, I had a couple of questions. I was going to be staying in the East Village, near Tompkins Square Park, and I needed to know, were there needles just, you know, everywhere? Could you not wear sandals? No, said my friend on the phone. She did not laugh at me. No, you can wear sandals. It’s all right.