My Brush With Poetry

Poetry may be one of those artistic forms you either love or can leave. For me, having to stand up in front of my classmates and recite some lines about Julius Caesar might have queered my enthusiasm. After two years of college where my course choices were anything but poetry, it dropped off my reading radar.

Then, in 1963 I went to a poetry reading at Northwestern University given by Theodore Roethke and was gob smacked by his physical presence and the poems he recited. He was a large man with an equally large bearing and along with seeing my first foreign film (“Don’t Shoot the Piano Player”), he was my first “real” poet.

It’s been a long time, but I still remember him reciting “My Papa’s Waltz.” Here’s the first stanza that will give you an idea if you don’t know it:

The whiskey on your breath   

Could make a small boy dizzy;   

But I hung on like death:   

Such waltzing was not easy.

Here was this man shifting his body to emulate the experience; what I learned much later was from his childhood. I came away from that evening and the start of brief encounters with poets of note.

While my husband attended graduate school at Northwestern University, I worked in Deering Library, where the head librarian was happiest when all of the books were on the shelves. She ran a tight ship allowing for no exceptions to her many rules.

I worked at the circulation desk several evenings a week and met Stephen Spender who was a visiting poet. He was famous for many books but World Within World included my neighbor (many years later) in Santa Monica Canyon – Christopher Isherwood. Poor Stephen, no matter his fame, he wasn’t allowed to take a rare book home that was on interlibrary loan. I was delighted to oblige him by going into the office and getting the book for him with the promise that he would return it to me – not to the “real librarians.” We struck a deal that allowed me to bask in his favor and a “Thank you, dear” whenever he needed a book. Yet another poet!

Charles Simic

In 1995 I lived in Amherst, MA and by then did read a bit of poetry. You can’t live there and not read Emily Dickinson!

A friend and I went to a local bookstore one evening to hear the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Charles Simic. He emigrated to the U.S. from Yugoslavia as a teenager and drew upon his own experiences of war-torn Belgrade. He wrote poems about the physical and spiritual poverty of modern life and taught English and creative writing for over 30 years at the University of New Hampshire.

If poets have “groupies” I became one that night. I read everything Simic wrote and did what I have often done – wrote him a fan letter. The deal with doing this is you can’t expect a reply. In my letter I mentioned that as a freelance writer and as yet unpublished author I pulled out his poem “Help Wanted” whenever I sent off an article to a magazine or applied for contract work.

Simic did reply with a thank you card and wrote: “All best. ‘Help Wanted’ came from my real experience, as they say.”

We had a brief correspondence that included my receiving a new poem from a book that was still at the printer. Frayed as they are, I still have his letter and poem.

Over the years, I’ve caught the poetry bug myself – usually a workshop induced exercise with extremely mixed results. Some of my attempts are still kicking around in a folder where I recently found these two.

The Forgiveness of Hummingbirds

“When you estranged yourself from your father and me,”

you say it as though one morning at breakfast

I turned the juice glass up to the light,

picked out a seed that rested on the bottom and

decided to make your life hell.

 

“That was a wonderful trip to the mountains,”

you say looking up from the photograph,

the box of pictures on your lap, swimming in memories.

I search the eyes of each of us, because, they say,

the eyes don’t lie.

 

Dad has struck his fake pleasant photo face. It’s an artform,

You have slipped your hand through my brother’s arm,

knitted together like the handmade sweater he is wearing,

Brother has swapped families – a good one for ours.

The jutting mountain’s vertical peak behind us puts me at a distance.

 

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” you say.

“Things happen to people,” I say, “to make them take the path they’re on.

Turning to look out the window.

“The hummingbirds are back,” you say. “Isn’t it a blessing that

just by putting out sweetened water

they’ve forgiven me for letting the feeder go dry.”

An Ode to Gregor Mendel

We have shared most everything

these five days, our lives, our memories.

Your cozy cabin, the cats on the comforter

while the coffee maker purrs.

 

Now poured into steaming mugs,

consumed cross legged on your rumpled bed,

peas in a warm pod against the rain outside.

 

That generations of peas could be traced,

that you look something like me.

One cell after another, one experience,

daughter and mother, the inescapable protein bond.

 

Elements of love, mistake, discord, joy

fusing us into these treasured days of reunion.

Loving you so, my heart rises

with the steam from the coffee

in the pale green mug, I have chosen from the shelf.

A note about Theodore Roethke’s passing. He died, drowning under questioned (heart or alcohol) circumstances in a swimming pool at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. I was a member there and while the pool had been converted into a Zen garden, I always paused to think of him.

Photo Credits: Brushes – rhondak native florida folk artist, hummingbird – dulcey -lima, pea vine – nadiia ganzhyi, fuchsias – townsend walton.