100 Poems to Break Your Heart
Page 45
To understand that not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.
An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father’s business failures—
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis—
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand. Indeed,
my father was comical.
His watches pinched, he tripped
on his pant cuffs and snored
loudly in movies, where
his weariness overcame him
finally. He didn’t believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.
“Failure” is an unswerving poem. In one determined stanza, it takes up a subject that’s practically off limits in a culture obsessed with wealth and success. The poem progresses by a series of declarative statements. It compresses a story. There is a sort of grim merriment in the distinction between “a nobody” and “a failure.” It’s almost a Yiddish joke. It’s worth pausing over the timing of the short, mostly three-beat lines and the understated emphasis on the line breaks. Each line creates its own quietly pronounced statement. Hence:
You can’t remember
a nobody’s name, that’s why
they’re called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
Where the line and the sentence coincide, it seems like the punch line to a joke. “Failures are unforgettable” is an eternal truth disguised as a wisecrack, which, as the critic Peter Schjeldahl quips, is “the American form of Montaigne-style aphorism.”
The speaker levels a sarcastic fury at the rabbi, who delivers “a stock eulogy”—he calls him “both a failure and a nobody.” The clergyman has failed to take into account the feelings of the bereaved mother and son dying from shame in the front row. The speaker in “Failure,” unlike the one in “For My Father,” now seems to understand the faith and even the buoyancy that his father had to summon up in order to sustain himself, to keep going. It’s exhausting not to believe in anything. The speaker still can’t quite forgive his uncle, who counts out on his fingers his brother’s lame and unlikely business ventures but can’t recall the savvy older brother who taught him things as a kid. The list of ways in which the father was “comical” does not read as comedy. Rather, the father’s perpetual weariness is what stands out.
We typically think of a poetic catalog as a gesture of affirmation. The cataloging impulse almost always expresses, in Richard Wilbur’s words, “a longing to possess the whole world, and to praise it.” That’s why Schultz’s list of all the things that his father didn’t believe in is amusing in a glum, bleak way. It’s a catalog of negativities. Think of it as a colliding series of subjects that most certainly don’t rhyme: “savings insurance newspapers / vegetables good or evil human / frailty history or God.” Some items are equivalent to reasons why the family is left destitute (savings, insurance), some show the father’s lack of interest in the larger world (newspapers), and some reveal his provincial background (vegetables). The fact that he didn’t believe in (presumably eating) vegetables is paired with the much more significant truth that he didn’t distinguish between good or evil, or believe in human weakness, history, or God. We vault from “savings” to “God” in one short list, which captures the extent of the father’s bankruptcy; he was not only financially broke but also exhausted and lost, physically unhealthy, spiritually bereft.
Funerals are supposed to bring families together. Not this one. The larger family apparently fears contagion and treats the two chief mourners accordingly. The effect is like a medieval shunning. In the end, the speaker is left alone, first with his mother, and then with his own feelings: “I left town / but failed to get away.” The poem concludes not on the father’s failure, which has been the subject all along, but on the son’s. He may leave town, but he never gets away, metaphorically speaking. Failure is his inheritance, his legacy.
The conclusion to the poem circles back to the writing of it. The poet is so obsessed by his father’s failure, as well as his own inability to escape from it, that he now needs to write a poem about it. This is a lonely, obsessive project. That’s lucky for us, though, because Philip Schulz has written a wonderfully successful poem about one of the great neglected subjects in American life: failure.
Michael Collier
* * *
“An Individual History”
(2007)
Michael Collier’s poems are so smoothly and cannily made that it’s possible to overlook their undercurrents, the way they find a seam in experience and plunge into the unknown, the mysterious. In “An Individual History,” the title poem of his sixth book, he unflinchingly enters the past to remember and reimagine one particular life. The poet has also turned this sparely notated life into a representative story. This unique history also illuminates the unwritten histories of thousands of others, “the detained and unparoled,” the marginal and misfortunate ones, the scarcely remembered and troubled “mentally ill.”
An Individual History
This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft
* * *
before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics
* * *
and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before Thorazine,
* * *
which the suicide O’Laughlin called “handcuffs for the mind.”
* * *
It was before, during, and after the time of atomic fallout,
* * *
Auschwitz, the Nakba, DDT, and you could take the water cures,
* * *
find solace in quarantines, participate in shunnings,
* * *
or stand at Lourdes among the canes and crutches.
* * *
It was when the March of Time kept taking off its boots.
* * *
Fridays when families prayed the Living Rosary
* * *
to neutralize communists with prayer.
* * *
When electroshock was electrocution
* * *
and hammers recognized the purpose of a nail.
* * *
And so, if you were as crazy as my maternal grandmother was then
* * *
you might make the pilgrimage she did through the wards
* * *
of state and private institutions,
* * *
and make of your own body a nail for pounding, its head
* * *
sunk past quagmires, coups d’etat, and disappearances
* * *
and in this way find a place in history
* * *
among the detained and unparoled, an individual like her,
* * *
though hidden by an epoch of lean notation—“Marked
* * *
Parkinsonian tremor,” “Chronic paranoid type”—
* * *
a time when the animal slowed by its fate
* * *
was excited to catch a glimpse of its tail
* * *
or feel through her skin the dulled-over joy
* * *
when for a moment her hands were still.
Collier has written a short note explaining the origin of “An Individual History.” At first, he started a poem based on transcriptions of his grandmother’s medical records, which one of his sisters had come upon in a roundabout way. He was moved by the bare notations—“Placed on iron and thorazine (50 mg, 4X a day). Up in a wheel chair. No weight on fractured leg”—and
statements recording her cryptic delusional pronouncements—“There was a heritage invasion” or “I changed my skin, my hair, and my weight all in one year.” But he could never find a framework for the found poem that he imagined he would write.
Years later, he read an essay about the history of psychotropic drugs and found himself responding viscerally to the names of the drugs. Their etymologies started to spark figurative possibilities. That’s how his long-dead college roommate Jimmy O’Laughlin came into the poem, calling Thorazine “handcuffs for the mind.” That designation, by the way, breaks Ezra Pound’s modernist credo by mixing a concrete noun and an abstraction (“don’t say ‘dim lands of peace’”) and is a vivid capsule description of how Thorazine manacles the mind of someone who takes it. It sounds like a phrase from an asylum poem by Theodore Roethke. Along the way, Collier also realized that he had found an avenue to tell his grandmother’s story, which, as he says, “might also speak to certain paranoid and delusional characteristics of our culture.”
One striking thing about the final version of this poem is that the grandmother doesn’t enter until the second half. That’s when it all becomes personal. “An Individual History” operates like a long, evenly distributed sonnet. It begins with a declaration seemingly out of a legend (“This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft”). It then takes thirteen lines to get to the turn, or volta, at line 14 (“And so, if you were as crazy as my maternal grandmother was then”) and then thirteen more lines to the finish. The lines are lengthy enough to carry both images and historical information. As the poem progresses, the individual lines keep stretching out and getting curbed back, especially toward the end, to a quasi-pentameter line of nine to twelve syllables. This creates a useful tension between the feeling and the facts. The extra spaces between the lines also give each one a greater emphasis, a longer pause between, and this provides the reader with more time to savor and process the myriad images and the information.
The poem begins with a statement about a period when almost no drugs existed to help people with psychoses. The second pronouncement considerably enlarges upon the situation: “It was before, during, and after the time of atomic fallout, / Auschwitz, the Nakba, DDT . . .” Here, in quick succession, the speaker catalogs four twentieth-century cataclysms: the fallout from nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, the 1948 Palestinian exodus, the Vietnam War. This was also an era when, he suggests, “you could take the water cures, find solace in quarantines, participate in shunnings, / or stand at Lourdes among the canes and crutches.” The twentieth century, in other words, was actually somewhat primitive in that people still tried to comfort themselves by means of magical thinking, escaping somewhere soothing, shutting others away, participating in social rejections (which he calls “shunnings”), or making a religious pilgrimage to a small town in the Pyrenees, as Catholics have been doing since the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, as he cleverly states, “It was when the March of Time kept taking off its boots.” Ancient rituals continue, but now with markedly twentieth-century goals: “Fridays when families prayed the Living Rosary / to neutralize communists with prayer.” The first section concludes in concise, fateful brutality: “When electroshock was electrocution / and hammers recognized the purpose of a nail.” The repetition of the prefix electro- darkly, inevitably, and fatally equates “electroshock” with “electrocution.” Also, hammers have been endowed with consciousness.
In the second section, the poem brings a single representative individual into focus. The grandmother’s journey from institution to institution is called a “pilgrimage,” giving it a religious or sacred dimension, and the hammer recognizing the function of the nail takes on special force as the woman makes of her body “a nail for pounding.” This is a hidden story, an unreported history, and thus this grandmother takes her place with those who have been sacrificed, who are “hidden by an epoch of lean notation.” Those scanty details from Collier’s grandmother’s medical records now find their proper place: “Marked Parkinsonian tremor,” “Chronic paranoid type.” A whole person and unnamed generations of people are being thus described. This is all that remains of them. But the poem ends not on the diagnosis, but on the animal life, the moment of vitality, something inside each of them:
a time when the animal slowed by its fate
* * *
was excited to catch a glimpse of its tail
* * *
or feel through her skin the dulled-over joy
* * *
when for a moment her hands were still.
By a leap of imaginative sympathy, Michael Collier has memorialized his grandmother, who was fated to live at a time before psychotropic drugs could help her. He also enlarges her story and sheds a bright light on our various paranoias, aspects of our painfully violent and delusional culture. A disquieting individual history points to a larger cultural story of magical religious thinking and murderous human impulses.
Lucia Perillo
* * *
“The Second Slaughter”
(2008)
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in On the Basis of Morality (1840). “Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.” Lucia Perillo shows the same sense of moral outrage in her cunning and furious anti-war poem “The Second Slaughter.”
The Second Slaughter
Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.
* * *
The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.
* * *
And here I turn my back on the epic hero—the one who slits
the throats of his friend’s dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.
* * *
When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once
* * *
I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement
though it is not.
Perillo told an interviewer that she wrote the fourth stanza of this poem in 1991, during the First Gulf War. The poem had started out as an anecdote—“When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep / until I heard about the birds.” She continued with the image of long-legged birds
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh.
This is a precise image of the natu
ral cost of industrial warfare. “By juxtaposing the birds’ vibrant colors with the dark hue of spilled oil,” the poet John James has noted, “Perillo emphasizes the damage inflicted by human carelessness.”
It took Perillo another seventeen years to find a place for this anecdote in a larger war poem triggered by the Iliad, an epic poem that was itself triggered by the vengeful wrath of Achilles (“Rage, O Goddess, sing the fury of Peleus’s son Achilles”). Perillo’s first stanza recalls how Achilles, devastated by the death of his friend Patroclus, savagely slaughtered and humiliated their enemy, Hector. Perillo quickly condenses the story from Book 22. She needs the anecdote to kick off her poem, but her real interest lies elsewhere. Her style is nonchalant, mordant, utterly contemporary: