May Poetry: Parents and Grandparents

(reflections on poems in the journal POETRY, May 2007)

Writing a poem about writing poems is so cliche, but sometimes it works. The May issue of POETRY opens with Bob Hicok's poem "O my pa-pa" (a cutesy title unlike anything in the poem itself), and it opens with the conceit, "Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop." Much of what follows is funny, at the expense of the sons who write from "the revenge school of poetry." Then he imagines how the father - poets would struggle to get past the common elements in their stories (esp., long days at the office), and he writes how hard it is to write about his own father "whose absence / was his presence" in terms of how he worked "with seven kids and a house to feed." Building things must be feeding the house, and the poet remembers the father's building a grandfather clock with the son who learned from it "that time is a constructed thing, a passing ticking, fancy." He returns to that circle of father - poets and their poems' "reciprocal dwelling on absence," wondering "why we disappeared as soon as we got our licenses." It's a poem of around sixty lines that link one association to the next, from the fanciful start through the particular experience, to tell a universal story.

Hicok's "For those whose reflex was yes" follows, and it, too, passes through a comical scene to something that stirs us. After a peculiar first few words (more about those, later), it launches into a familiar anecdote, how a mother and son fall "into the river's million hands" that pull them down. A man jumps in to save them. So far, so realistic. But shortly volunteers leap in left and right to save everyone else. It's like a slapstick comedy (along the lines of the Tar-Baby), then a kind of nightmare, as their bodies make a "river within the river." It becomes beautiful as the poet imagines this happening for the rest of the "dying day." Now I return to the first words, "Nobody I know is a god," and wonder if this is to say that none of us can know what the consequences will be if our "reflex is yes." Again, this reminds me of my own father, whose words and example have told me, "In situations like that, if you don't act, you'll regret it the rest of your life." The poem's final image seems to bless the making of the choice.

Anne Stevenson, whose work I've enjoyed in previous issues, writes "Inheriting my Grandmother's Nightmare." There's an anecdote behind this, the persona's spilling out the contents of her grandmother's silverware drawer. Contemplating the "lavender world" of the grandmother "turned upside down" as each succeeding generation grows louder and ruder was enough poem for me, a meditation on "the adhesiveness of things / to the ghosts that prized them" as the ghost of the grandmother clings to her spoons decades later. Somehow, the poem moves on to the grandmother's experience of the Holocaust, and that adds a different flavor that overpowers the rest.

Geoffrey Brock's poem "Homeland Security" begins as an infant son's cries "worm" through the poet's ear plugs and sleep at 4 A.M. The poem takes place in the time it takes the poet to decide not to go to the child just yet -- and his mind wanders to the defenses he's laid out to stop insects' assaults on his homeland. The political allusion in the title pops up in a reference to the "patriot ants" from "republics / endlessly perishing." This is political without being polemical, a reminder that, as my grandmother Thelma taught me, no matter what we do to prepare, "there's always something."