In the community library presentations I’ve been
giving since my appointment as state poet, I’m frequently asked which
contemporary poets I like to read. It’s a funny thing how that question
–obliquely akin, say, to what is my favorite Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop
or Emily Dickinson poem– seems to tie my tongue. Garrulous by nature, I get
over that quickly enough to rattle off a half-dozen names. The program over, I
hop into my car and, within seconds of leaving this or that library, I begin to
wonder why on earth I didn’t also mention X or Y or Z?
I don’t really have any especial interest, though, in
choosing up an A team. My tastes are eclectic enough, for instance, as to let
me savor the best of Allen Ginsberg and the best of Donald Justice. I have noted,
however, that a name I tend to mention belongs to one of my predecessors as
Vermont poet laureate: Ellen Bryant Voigt. Many readers of this blog will
know, or at least know of, her superb work. This is meant to remind them of
what a local treasure she is, but even more to urge those to whom she remains
unknown to dig into that treasure.
Ms. Voigt’s newest collection, just out in October,
is Headwaters. Run. Yet I mean to
consider an earlier poem here, for no particular reason save that it so lodged
itself in my mind when I first came upon it. This was owing in part, no doubt,
to the fact that a good friend was just then recovering –successfully, I’m
delighted to say– from a full mastectomy. Like the speaker here too, I’m the
child of a strongly authoritative female parent.
But the poem, on its intrinsic strengths, would have
stuck with me even in the absence of all that:
Lesson
Whenever
my mother, who taught
small children forty years,
already knew the answer.
"Would you like to" meant
you would. "Shall we" was
another, and "Don't you think."
As in "Don't you think
it's time you cut your hair."
So when, in the bare room,
in the strict bed, she said,
"You want to see?" her hands
were busy at her neckline,
untying the robe, not looking
down at it, stitches
bristling where the breast
had been, but straight at me.
I did what I always did:
not weep --she never wept--
and made my face a kindly
whitewashed wall, so she
could write, again, whatever
she wanted there.
small children forty years,
already knew the answer.
"Would you like to" meant
you would. "Shall we" was
another, and "Don't you think."
As in "Don't you think
it's time you cut your hair."
So when, in the bare room,
in the strict bed, she said,
"You want to see?" her hands
were busy at her neckline,
untying the robe, not looking
down at it, stitches
bristling where the breast
had been, but straight at me.
I did what I always did:
not weep --she never wept--
and made my face a kindly
whitewashed wall, so she
could write, again, whatever
she wanted there.
When I talk about poetry in my visits (and have talked in these posts now and then), I contend that what
lyric can accomplish – in a way perhaps other modes of discourse ordinarily
cannot– is the simultaneous dramatization of a number of emotions, thoughts,
and impulses, in one frame, no matter some are flatly contradictory of one
another. To that extent, though of course as a practitioner I am biased, the
lyric poem seems to me our most effective mode of demonstrating how the mind
actually works.
That mind, after all, does not always operate in an entirely
consecutive manner. Logic and ratiocination are cultivated skills, and although
they do serve us well in many instances, they are helpless, I think, to render
that simultaneity and often that contradictoriness in deep human response. Note
in “Lesson,” for example, the inevitably mixed feelings one might harbor with
respect to so strong a mother as the one in “Lesson.” Again the feelings are
contemporaneous.
In Voigt’s account, I’d suggest, we are called upon to
admire the sturdiness and lack of self-pity on the part of the recuperating
parent, even as we may feel the degree to which those very qualities might have
constituted longtime burdens for her child to bear. In our age, when the
forthright expression of feeling seems to be all but sacred, the woman in the
“strict bed” (how deftly Voigt chooses that figure!) appears to dissuade the
speaker from it. And yet is not the mother’s undauntedness at least an equally
important value to her daughter’s self-voicing? And mustn’t we, like the
writer, acknowledge authority in a woman who “taught small children/forty
years” even as one can feel the discomfiture here in the poet’s continuing to
be treated in some respects as a small child herself? There may be a degree of
condescension in the lesson the older woman passes on, but I sense something
exemplary in it too.
Further: when Voigt refers to her mother’s “strict bed,”
can’t we recognize that that mother is now enduring her own set of strictures,
her disease being no respecter of personality or accomplishment and old habits
of mind dying hard in any event? These things alone should allow us to cut her
some slack, as the saying goes. Don’t we likewise have more than one
understanding of the speaker’s face when she describes it as “a
kindly/whitewashed wall...”? We may regret that the speaker feels the need to
put on a mask, to be less than “genuine”; on the other hand. there is genuine
kindness in her very act of self-disguise.
Needless to say, as in all my commentaries, I here
share only my own responses and values. I don’t presume to speak for others,
nor to tell them how to read this or any other poetic utterance, all poems of
quality being open-ended ones. I mean only to demonstrate how one person’s mind
may be moved in that direction of multivalence upon encountering so good a
piece of writing as this.
