by Floyd Skloot
This book was where I encountered the poets who would remain touchstones for me and come to occupy my top shelf. The text of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” read and reread numerous times that spring, is so densely annotated that many lines are unreadable. “So sensual!” I wrote. And beside the final line, in which undulating pigeons sink “downward to darkness, on extended wings,” there is just “Oh!” I can almost feel myself there, as a twenty-one-year-old, fully opening up to poetry for the first time. Underneath Elizabeth Bishop’s simple and clear lines in “The Map,” I—the young man raised in an island home that threatened to drown us all in fury—have drawn a wavy pair of squiggles beneath the innocent-sounding lines “Along the fine tan sandy shelf / is the land tugging at the sea from under?”
Reading Modern Poetry is also where I found, in a comment by William Stafford about the writing of “Traveling through the Dark,” a lasting justification for my urge to reexamine and write about dark childhood events that obsessed me: “an experience unfolds the depth any experience may conceal till it is touched and sprung into its poem.… Writing the poem becomes a process of discovering what elements contribute to the distinction of the event.” Poetry would become an act of discovery for me, a way to make sense of experiences I could not escape.
It is also where I found that T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” like so many other poems I had explicated in my Introduction to Poetry or Major British Writers courses, was not primarily a puzzle to decode but a moving and musical expression of emotion. I loved the way Eliot led me through Prufrock’s physical and emotional wanderings as the long poem moved toward its devastating end, when thoughts of a walk upon the beach led him to say, “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. // I do not think that they will sing for me.” The lines themselves held such loneliness, and when I noticed that Eliot had placed “I do not think that they will sing for me” as its own separate stanza, I registered the power of formal control at work.
Near the middle of the semester, Pinsker invited a young poet from New York to come down to Lancaster for a reading. He’d liked a poem of hers published in New American Review, and knew she’d just published a debut collection titled Firstborn. Louise Glück declined to do a reading, but agreed to visit the writing class. She was twenty-five, only four years older than we were, and looked haunted as she glowered from the cover of her book, body turned away but dark eyes cast back toward us, taking our measure, asserting distance, offering a testy welcome. It was a pose that suggested to me that the poetry she was offering came with some risk for both the poet and reader: Are you ready for this? it seemed to ask. And am I? I found it exciting to read her poems in preparation for the class. These early poems were, as critic William Logan has noted, “disconcerting, morbid,” and “heavily marked by the influence of Sylvia Plath.” In “Cottonmouth Country,” she wrote about how “Death wooed us” and about “leaving a skin there” in the murky, sultry landscape of the southeastern shore. The poems combined anger with terrible vulnerability, a mix that I connected to, and they expressed a sense that those closest to us—our family, our friends, our lovers—were the most dangerous to us. Given my own tendency toward vigilance in such relationships, I knew what it meant when, in “The Wound,” Glück said that she had “gone careful” while at her most intimate with someone. This was highly charged material dealt with in straightforward terms, but in language that managed to remain lyrical. A few of the poems, like “Bridal Piece,” referred to the same south shore Long Island setting where I too had lived. The subject matter and the tone of her poems felt to me like an invitation, or a granting of permission—this was the way I must write, the opposite of impersonal, allusive, intellectual. Glück’s poems were also “seductive” and taut, Logan wrote, “reduced to slivers of glass.” Formally precise, often spoken by characters other than the poet, they showed me strategies for achieving a liberating distance within the enclosed dimension of form.
In class, she tolerated our comments and questions, read us a new poem, soon to appear in New American Review and subsequently, in 1975, in her second collection, The House on Marshland. It was the first time I had heard a poet—other than my classmates or Pinsker—read his or her work. In this instance, giving voice to such intense personal feelings through a poem spoken by a persona—by the fairy-tale heroine Gretel in the aftermath of having pushed the witch into the oven—Glück was performing and confessing at the same time, and I was mesmerized both by her and by the poem itself. “This is the world we wanted,” she said, holding back the drama, letting the short sentence echo, dealing with her conflicting and nearly overwhelming emotions. “All who would have seen us dead / are dead.”
If Louise Glück unintentionally granted me permission to be a poet, Anne Sexton clarified the terms. Pinsker had seen how Glück’s visit had affected me and, a few weeks later, invited me along to hear Sexton read at Hood College, in Frederick, Maryland. Hood was an all-female school and we were the only males in the full audience, adding to the intensity, singularity, and strangeness of the experience. By the time we arrived, I’d read all four books Sexton had published by then, including the new one, Love Poems, which came out only two months earlier, and I was hooked. Like Robert Lowell, with whom she’d studied at Boston University, Sexton undertook the delicate balancing of wild feeling and poetic restriction. But she seemed to me to write of even more extreme states, under greater pressure of emotion, and from a more volatile combination of inner and outer trauma. The poems’ stability was not always assured. Their subjects—illness, family, love, the act of writing—were explored at their most threatening, and she made them sound at once essential and dangerous. Her best poems tended to rattle and rage in their confines, threatening their own very existence. The speakers sometimes reminded me of my mother at her most crazed and desperate, then sometimes reminded me of myself trying to hold things together under the onslaught of madness around me. I read, and could not believe that someone other than I had written “The Black Art,” which ended:
Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hats,
we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
Sexton, as she often did, began her reading with the poem “Her Kind.” According to her biographer, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Sexton did this to show audiences “what kind of woman she was, and what kind of poet.… It was the way Sexton stepped from person to persona.” But then, partway through the twenty-one-line poem, she began to cry, which tended to blur the distinction between person and persona, and underscore the way Sexton’s poetry teetered between self-exploration and self-display. I remember realizing, in this fraught moment, that the poetry I was drawn to reading was poetry that drew little distinction between body and spirit, feeling and reason. I could hardly take my eyes off Sexton’s hands, trembling as she turned pages, then balling into fists as she read.
Near the end of her reading, I heard a whisper and looked over at Pinsker sitting beside me. He was silent, looking at the ceiling with his eyes closed, mouth drawn tight, arms folded across his chest. It was the position of deep concentration that I recognized from class, and I knew he hadn’t been the whisperer. Then it came again, and I almost vaulted from my seat. It was my own inner voice, the voice in my head, but somehow different too, calmer than usual, as though exerting patience until certain it had my attention. I took out a pen, turned over the flyer that announced Sexton’s reading, and wrote the opening lines of what would become, more than a year later, the first poem I recognized as being in my own voice. He parted the doors at four. / By eight the sawdusted floors / were patched with clots of feathers / and blood.
When I looked up at Sexton again, and my mind returned to the room, she was saying the final lines of “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward” in a voice almost shocking in its tenderness: “I choose / your only way, my small inher
itor / and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose.”
After the reading, Pinsker and I joined Sexton and some of the audience for an informal question-and-answer session in a smaller, more intimate room. I stood to her left and just behind her line of sight, knowing I should just listen and unable anyway to frame the question I wanted to ask. I took a deep breath, then felt Pinsker’s comforting hand on my shoulder.
It’s strange to recognize that almost all of my poetry-reading exemplars were identified during those thirteen weeks in the spring of 1969, in Pinsker’s class. The poets who shaped me as reader and writer then have remained the poets I need beside me now. I know more of their work, and more of their lives, and that immersion has only deepened my appreciation. There are also many others, read and reread over the last forty-four years, whose work is important to me and who occasionally rotate onto the top shelf so I can engage with it again: Donald Hall, Seamus Heaney, Donald Justice, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, Gibbons Ruark, Louis Simpson, Ron Slate, W. D. Snodgrass, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Richard Wilbur. And there are individual poems by these and others that I turn to. But my top shelf, in the fifteen homes I’ve lived in since leaving Lancaster in 1969, has had a consistent core of occupants.
Last month, I spoke with Sanford Pinsker for an hour. He’s retired, living in Florida, and while he remembers hearing Anne Sexton read several times, doesn’t recall our trip to Hood College. What he does remember is a series of phone calls from me in the years after I graduated, as I studied for a year with Thomas Kinsella, then worked for seventeen years in the field of public policy before becoming disabled in 1988. In those phone calls, he says, I would talk about the poetry I was reading, or we’d discuss my poems, and he understood how important poetry still was to me, even though I was working with budgets and governments.
“The roots were there,” he said, “a deep love of poetry that deepened instead of going away.”
Which gave me the opportunity I hadn’t known I was waiting for. “You should know, Sandy. You’re the one who planted those roots.”
Pinsker’s class, and its timing in my life, could not have been better for me. Without realizing it, I’d been moving closer to a life in poetry. I was in the right place when a young teacher offered his first writing class, a young poet agreed to visit that class, and a prizewinning poet overcame the forces that would lead to her suicide five years later and was able to put on a performance that would liberate me to begin writing in my own voice. “Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal / toward rites I do not know,” Sexton wrote in “The Lost Ingredient.” I believe that this is precisely what is permitted to me by having the work of Frost, Eliot, Bishop, Stevens, Thomas, Larkin, Roethke, or Sexton herself so close. They make my work possible.
7
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SOMETHING TO MARVEL AT
Discovering Jules Verne at Sixty
As Beverly and I walked down the sodden creekside trail, sounds of traffic from Interstate 84 behind us gradually turned into the sound of Latourell Falls ahead of us. The transition was complete when the creek bent east to open a sudden view of the falls cascading down the north side of Pepper Mountain. We stopped to watch its 250-foot plunge. Though only thirty miles east of Portland, in the Columbia River Gorge, the spot felt like a passageway into another world.
Deeper in the woods, the morning darkened and chilled. But like an echo of sunlight, otherworldly bright yellow lichen flourished on the basalt column beside the falls. Ice lingered here and there on exposed rock as though time moved differently here. Provided we didn’t think about the neatly carved directional signs marking the trail, the weathered benches, a wooden bridge across Latourell Creek, or swarms of tourists chattering and listening to iPods, the scene was almost prehistoric: a damp, densely firred canyon filled with reverberation from the falls, strange hues all around, deadfall hosting swarms of lush life, birds darting through shafts of mist. From just the right perspective, it was a vision of the truly marvelous, a teeming spot where the distant past thrived within the familiar present.
Trained as a geologist, a former master gardener, now an impressionist landscape painter, and avid birder, Beverly is at home in the natural world. Her knowledge and instinct allow her intimate connection to forms of the earth, an appreciation for cycles of growth and loss, a grasp of the history contained within the wild. She liked being there by the falls.
Brooklyn born, a city dweller until I married Beverly and lived for thirteen years with her in the woods of rural western Oregon, I remain much less in tune with nature. Engaged, an alert and attentive observer, I’m more edgy and wary, detached rather than comfortable. Also, my balance still compromised twenty years after the viral attack that had damaged my brain, I found the uneven footing beside Latourell Creek difficult, the ups and downs quickly tiring. But I followed as Beverly moved through the woods taking photographs, describing what rocks revealed, naming plants and trees.
Near the frothing pool where the falls crashed with full force, I found myself thinking that this was just the sort of place Jules Verne could have set a scene in his sixty-four-work series known as the Extraordinary Journeys. Strange, isolated, out of time, with the outsize power of nature on full display. But without, of course, the smart and beautiful woman. Or the disabled man.
A Verne novel’s calm, masculine hero would be accompanied by a powerful male sidekick and a loyal assistant, as the harpoonist Ned Land and manservant Conseil accompanied Professor Aronnax onto Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; nephew Axel and guide Hans accompanied Professor Otto Lidenbrock into the volcano in Journey to the Center of the Earth; servant Passepartout accompanied gentleman Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days; or the reporter Gideon Spilett, sailor Pencroff, and his courageous boy Harbert accompanied engineer Cyrus Smith and his servant Neb in The Mysterious Island. There might even be a male dog or monkey too, as in The Mysterious Island. Rather than a midday sightseeing destination just beyond a city’s suburb, Latourell Falls would be located on an uncharted island or in some far-off outpost at the remote end or the deep core of the planet. And despite the pristine beauty, it would be plagued by threatening creatures and people with evil intentions. The man standing here, looking around, would be, like Cyrus Smith, “very learned, very practical.” He would be “an unusually resourceful person,” someone “ever ready for anything, competent in everything” as he explored the unknown, facing down every threat, making his own way. A man “of great mettle … a man of action.” He would, in sum, be unlike me in every way. And any women would be back home, yearning for their men to return, not leading a limping, aging fellow thinking about stories of fictional adventure.
Verne had been on my mind lately, though I’d never read any of his books. I’d seen the movies 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days more than fifty years ago, but all I remembered were a giant squid attack near the end of the former, and a fancy souvenir book I got when seeing the latter at Radio City Music Hall in 1956. Giant squid, that was Jules Verne to me. When Beverly and I ordered squid at a restaurant in Provence three summers earlier, and the dish consisted of a reeking rubbery white slab instead of the small fried rings we had anticipated, I’d set it aside after one taste, saying that it looked like something out of Jules Verne. To me, based on no direct encounters with the work, Verne was a writer of things monstrous, tales of the earth and its creatures run amok, a science fictiony/horror hack, a nineteenth-century Stephen King, whose work I also hadn’t read.
But now I was reconsidering Verne. It began a few weeks earlier, when Beverly and I were talking about childhood movies that had made lasting impressions on us. I named 1954’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a schmaltzy musical-western-love-story I saw at age seven, fascinated by a world so alien to my own. I still know all its forgettable songs by heart. I also mentioned The Defiant Ones, from 1958, in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis play escaped convicts chained together as they
flee through the South. I saw it with my brother when I was eleven and he, at nineteen, was someone to whom I had often felt awkwardly shackled as we fled our parents’ rages. Beverly talked about Pollyanna, from 1960, and how strongly she resonated with the Haley Mills character’s positive outlook, the way it changed everybody’s life for the better. She also named Journey to the Center of the Earth, which as a child had fascinated and frightened her, lured and repelled her, its scenes remaining vivid for nearly fifty years. She wondered if it was behind her collegiate desire to study geology.
Shortly after that conversation, we watched a new, made-for-television version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, starring Rick Schroder, Peter Fonda, and Victoria Pratt. It was set in 1870s Alaska rather than 1860s Iceland, and transformed Verne’s story of a scientist’s quest for discovering the earth’s core into an abandoned woman’s search for her missing husband. Throughout the program, Beverly pointed out the ways this travesty altered the original movie’s narrative. She kept saying we should be sure to see the 1959 version she knew and loved, and that I’d missed altogether.
I went online to order a copy at Amazon.com and looked around at other material by Jules Verne. That was when it struck me: not only had I never read his work, I had never read Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, H. G. Wells, Alexandre Dumas, none of the great authors of boyhood adventure classics. Never read Gulliver’s Travels, King Solomon’s Mines, The Red Badge of Courage, or Robinson Crusoe either.