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Mar 112013

Fleda Brown herewith offers a wonderfully smart, touching essay about girlhood, clothes and, amazingly enough, poetry! How does she rope all this together? And touching? Yes! The sweet free tomboyish little girl (of a certain era), a professor’s daughter, running free the summer long half-naked and innocent, suddenly a young lady, going to school, in dresses and appliqued sweaters, proper girl’s clothes, an awkward and constricting mask that delivers her to the agony of fashion and fitting in and the awful kindness of friends who feel sorry for her. Fleda delivers the goods, the terrible moments of humiliation, guilt and misunderstanding we all go through as children, often centered around money, precious money and small dreams that go awry, often small events in retrospect yet still capable of making you wince and yet which do not defeat you — as evidenced by the delightful pun in the title.

This beautiful, human, raw essay is the last installment here at Numéro Cinq of a series of essays by Contributing Editor Sydney Lea and Fleda Brown, two old friends, also two poet laureates, who have been writing a book together, a call-and-response essay book as Syd likes to call it, one essay calling forth another on a similar topic. As Sydney writes, “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.”

In fact Autumn House Books is publishing the book next month, April, as an e-book called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. Other essays from the book published here at NC include Fleda Brown’s “Books Made of Paper” and three essays by Sydney Lea “Pony and Graveyard: A Dream of the Flesh,” “Unskunked” and “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know.”

I should add a somber note here. As you read this, Fleda Brown is being treated for cancer. She has been writing about her treatment under the title “My Wobbly Bicycle” at her blog at fledabrown.com.

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Well, you’d think this one would be MY subject. But I never had any clothes. That is how it felt. Oh, when I was a child, the first child, first grandchild, I was the darling of my grandparents’ and my aunts’ hearts. They crocheted, knitted, stitched, embroidered. There are boxes and boxes full of photos of me, wonder-child bedecked in sweaters, scarves, wool coats with fur trim, fur muff, delicate flowered sundresses and sunbonnets. Then I grew up.

My parents were getting along on my father’s assistant professor’s salary, with three, then four children, one of them seriously retarded and needing very expensive drugs. And neither of my parents thought of “managing” money. They talked and yelled and cried about “budgets,” but nothing ever changed. At least once a year, one of the grandparents would be applied to for assistance, which would arrive, accompanied by the fury of my father in having to accept it. Well, enough of that. The fact is, I had at least one requisite new dress in the fall when school started, usually two, plus new shoes, usually courtesy of a grandparent. Care packages of clothes would arrive now and then, things picked out by my grandmother, never clothes I wanted to wear. Many of them were a terrible embarrassment, all wrong for what I felt was stylish in my crowd, but I was made to wear them anyway. They were new and they were “nice.”

There was one sweater, white with appliqued flowers on it—a name brand and expensive. But the short sleeves had a tiny bit of a puff to them that felt dorky to me. And the flowers! Furthermore, my sister was given a matching one. A deadly move on my grandmother’s part. I was made to wear the sweater to school. I may not remember this right, but in my memory, as soon as I felt I could get away with it, I deliberately held the sweater under hot water until the bright flowers on the applique faded onto the white sweater. “How can I wear it, now?” I asked. Did I really do that or just dream of it? I can’t remember, but I am pretty sure that the fading happily happened. Of course my mother was somewhat careless about sorting clothes, so I may not have been the culprit.

Actually, after I got past the shorts-with-no-top age, I never had things I wanted to wear. I was furious when I was made to cover up with little halter tops, even before I had breasts. I was furious when I was made to wear dresses to school every day when I wanted to wear pants. Jeans were still in the future, but I would have invented them had I known how. I was most furious when I was made to wear a bra. I threw it across the room after one day in its miserable straitjacketing. I was furious when I had to wear stockings and garter belts and huge, full skirts with huge, full slips under them. I did not want to be a “lady,” although I didn’t particularly have an objection to being a girl.

Conversely, I longed to have ballet-slipper shoes, but I had flat feet and was forced to clump around in saddle oxfords or brown “Girl Scout” shoes.

Maybe I would have had fewer objections to girl clothes had I been able to buy the clothes many of my friends had—matching Bobbie Brooks sweater sets, straight and pleated wool skirts. The only days that I felt good about my clothes were the days the pep-club, called the “Peppers”—of which I was one—were required to wear their uniforms to school. We had white sweaters with a big purple B on the front, over a bulldog’s face, and purple pleated skirts. I fit in. I was just fine.

I was asked to join a high school girls’ sorority. Part of the initiation process was that two members had to come to your house and pick out an outfit from your closet that you were required to wear to school every day for a week. They usually picked outlandishly mismatched clothes, silly things. The two girls who came to my house looked through my closet while I stood aside, trembling with embarrassment. I had so few clothes and they were all so, well, not-quite-right. I could tell the girls were nonplussed. They did the worst thing possible: they felt sorry for me. They chose the nicest skirt and blouse they could find.

I always felt that part of the problem was me, that it was my fault I had no clothes. I was so headstrong: with my baby-sitting money, I bought some beautiful plaid wool fabric. I had this idea I’d make myself a skirt and vest. I cut it out. I cut it out wrong. I had no practice and no guidance. Did I slow down and ask a friend’s mother for help? No. The awkward puzzle pieces I had cut would not go together properly. I stuffed them in a drawer, feeling wretched and guilty, and tried to forget.

Seething underneath the clothes issue for me was the tacit sense of the role women were supposed to play. The clothes were indicative. By the time I was seven, I had to put on that halter top. But the boys didn’t. I had to wear dresses with ruffles, which made me feel decorated, ornamental, and as powerless as my mother. I hated ruffles and still do. This is not, as I said, a matter of wanting to be a boy. It is a matter of wanting to move freely and feel essential, just myself, an L.L. Bean sort of person.

I look at the models in the ads in the New York Times. They seem to combine, these days, a look of both power and glamor. At least that’s what they apparently want to show: sleek tigresses, beautiful, furry, seething with power. But look into the eyes. It looks dead in there: the ads are pictures of women required to project tigresses. Women whose job is to sell clothes, who are desperate to hold their position in the world of high fashion, who will project anything you ask them to project.

Oh, really, I do like clothes. I always have loved the days when I’ve felt beautiful in my clothes. In the seventies, I had a pair of blue corduroy bell-bottoms and platform shoes that made me feel sharp and sexy. I bought one mini-skirt, which I thought was kind of cute, but I was teaching school and found that if I raised my arm to write on the blackboard, I exposed more of me than my students needed to see.

In those few years I taught high school, I made some of my own clothes (yes, I did!): pants and tops, as well as many curtains and pillow covers. I made a few cute outfits for my daughter, one little bell bottom jumper with big lady-bugs all over it, with a matching purse. She was five or six and looked very Mod. I liked sewing. I was not too bad at it. It was all-absorbing, meditative, and I could imagine I was saving money. Then when clothes got cheaper than fabric, I gave it up. Also, I had more and more things to do that seemed more important to me than sewing.

I attribute my ambivalent attitude toward clothes to two things: my early lack of money and my tomboyishness. The purchase of clothes was always accompanied by a great deal of angst when I was young. There was so little money that when I had any to spend, I was terrified I’d make a wrong choice. I often did. And had to live with it. If I’d used my own money, I knew that every dollar I spent equaled two hours’ baby-sitting time. I would buy something, my stomach knotted up both from fear of making a mistake and fear of my father’s yelling about the money spent. I grew cagey about the latter. I could fudge on how much something cost. I could say I had to have it for school for some obscure reason. I could say I’d used all or half my own money. Or something.

And then the tomboy-thing. I wanted to look beautiful, I wanted to look like the girls in my class I admired. But what made me happiest was climbing around creekbanks in pants (no jeans yet, remember) and an old flannel shirt, looking for crawdads. Those clothes were the ones I loved best.

I think about the sociology of clothes. In the fifties and on into the early sixties, the styles, the requirements in clothing for girls and boys were as separate as our psychology was thought to be. Girls had to wear dresses to school unless the temperature was below a certain degree, I can’t remember what. But those days felt free as holidays, although we generally felt we must wear a skirt on top of the pants. When I was an undergraduate, girls were not allowed to wear pants on the University of Arkansas campus, except under a raincoat. And furthermore, they were not to wear them downtown. After all, they were “representing the University.” All winter, all of my young life, my legs were freezing cold. Because I was a girl.

Boundaries were clear. Unlike now, when cast-off 50s dresses are worn with cowboy boots, tight torn jeans with diamonds and a sleek silk camisole, a tuxedo with tennis shoes. And too, when future anthologists—if there are any—look back on this era’s poems, they’ll see hybrid poems that pull in all manner of objects and thoughts and commercials and movies and music. Poems in received forms and free-verse poems, poems that announce that they’re poems but look and read like prose. And prose poems. Soft boundaries between genres.

And self-conscious display of the making, the mechanics of the poem. The poet stepping in to say how it’s going, this writing of a poem. Last weekend I attended a baby shower. The very-pregnant mother was wearing a long, form-fitting top and long skirt—very chic. It’s fashionable to let the belly show, the stark progression of belly-growth, to be proud of it. When I was pregnant, maternity clothes were shapeless bags we buttoned over our midsection to hide the protrusion. We were only a generation or so from the time when pregnant women were expected to stay inside as they started “showing,” as if any display of our sexual potency was shameful.

But even though now a woman can wear anything, really anything, she wishes and be acceptable on most occasions, somehow underneath, it feels to me as if that change hasn’t netted as much as we’d like to think. The truth is, I see in the faces of some of those women in pillbox hats and blue suits on reruns of ancient game shows more maturity and more command of themselves and their environment than I see in the faces of many young women today, who seem uncertain of who they are and what they want to be. Those women in pillbox hats were fitting themselves into a role, true, but they knew they had responsibility for that role, for enacting it well and truthfully—being a good wife, a good mother, a good housekeeper. These were not the women on Mad Men. The ones I’m thinking of were the real ones.

I don’t want to go back there, and couldn’t if I did. Same with poetry. This is an incredibly exciting time for clothes and poetry, it seems to me. Exciting and necessarily unnerving. What we wear, what and how we write, is either demonstrating who we think we are, how we think the world is organized and what it all means, or it’s demonstrating who we’re supposed to be according to our culture’s norms. Who can tell which is which? These days I wear jeans almost all the time. I’m an attractive woman for my age, but not a glamorous one, although I passionately admire my gorgeously dressed friends. The glamour-gene bypassed me. I have a friend, a writer, who said her goal in life is to make enough money with her writing to be able to get up every morning, her only decision being which pair of jeans to put on. Amen to that.

—Fleda Brown

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Fleda Brown was born in Columbia, Missouri, and grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She earned her Ph.D. in English (specialty in American Literature) from the University of Arkansas, and in 1978 she joined the faculty of the University of Delaware English Department, where she founded the Poets in the Schools Program, which she directed for more than 12 years. Her books, essays, and individual poems have won many awards. Her sixth collection of poems, Reunion (2007), was the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin. She has co-edited two books, most recently On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers. Her collection of memoir-essays, Driving With Dvorak, was released in 2010 from the University of Nebraska Press.

She served as poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-2007, when she retired from the University of Delaware and moved to Traverse City, Michigan. In Traverse City, she writes a monthly column on poetry for the Record-Eagle newspaper, and she has a monthly commentary on poetry on Interlochen Public Radio. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA, and she spends summers with her husband, Jerry Beasley, also a retired English professor, at their cottage on a small lake in northern Michigan. Between them, they have four children and ten grandchildren.

Pony and Graveyard: A Dream of the Flesh — Sydney Lea

Feb 132013

Sydney Lea here attacks head on the dread subject of sex but manages somewhat quixotically to ride away (on a Shetland pony named Warrior Maiden) into utterly charming reminiscences about his youthful passion for Angie Morton (his version of Dulcinea del Toboso) and a shantytown and “Colored Graveyard” he would pass traveling to and from her house. This is an instance where an author makes a virtue out of necessity, doing a masterful job of being entertaining while not writing about what he doesn’t want to write about. As Syd writes, “Before I was able to publish the one and only novel I ever composed, for example, my agent had practically to horsewhip me into juicing up my characters’ erotic encounters.” Here are beautiful, lapidary lines: “Unrequitedness thus became, as I say, an expectation.” And a sweet reflection on the complexity of life which, yes, casts up metaphors that we spend the rest of our days decoding.

This essay, along with two others, “Unskunked” and “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know,” published earlier on Numéro Cinq, are among Sydney Lea’s contributions to a book he has co-written with fellow poet laureate Fleda Brown. The book is called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives and is forthcoming as an e-book in April from Autumn House Books. The pattern of the book is a call-and-response. As Sydney writes, “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.” We have also published here one of Fleda Brown’s essays from the book, her wonderful meditation on books and reading, “Books Made of Paper.” And in our March issue, we’ll have another. I will be sorry to see this series end for us. (But buy the book.)

A tricky one for me, this subject. Its once-upon-a-time factor must start at ten years old or so, before I understood sexuality except by some vague surmise, In those days, I habitually rode Warrior Maiden, my fat little Shetland pony, past Angie Morton’s house. Angie was sixteen, I think, and movie star beautiful, at least in my eyes. She was scarcely taller than I, and would never grow taller, but her figure was simply statuesque. She had raven hair, almost chalk-white skin, and the most penetrating eyes, ice-blue, almost white themselves, I had ever seen or would ever see after.

My hope, often enough repaid, was to catch her in her yard or, far more exciting, for reasons I must also have dimly surmised, through her bedroom window. No, that’s not accurate: the compensation for my hope was never adequate. True, I couldn’t conceive what satisfaction might entail, but I knew Angie’s languid wave or, on happier occasions, her desultory word or two of chitchat was not it.

So desperate was my need for this young woman, whatever that need comprised, that I frequently extended my rides just so I could pass her house more than a single time on a single ride. I remember tethering Warrior Maiden to an apple tree and simply sitting under it for as long as I could bear, gorging on the wormy windfalls till I made myself queasy. At least I thought the fruit was to blame for how I felt.

These delaying maneuvers resulted once in a frightening but thrilling trip home after dark. In our corner of Montgomery County lay a small settlement of southern-born blacks, who had made the hard trek north in search of better fortunes. Most of them went to work in an asbestos mill in Ambler, though a fair share took jobs on local farms, or, if they were women, they labored as domestics in the more prosperous households. I found their little dwellings fascinating and somehow foreboding: in the warmer months, the front doors seemed always open, but the interiors were kept so dark that I could never quite make out the figures inside. In one tiny house, a harmonica seemed always to be playing, though I couldn’t find the musician. Each shack seemed multi-generational: I could tell that much by the wide variety of human heights among the shadowy occupants.

The shantytown had an aroma of cuisine, exotic, at least to me, pungent, and attractive; but the truly unusual feature of the community was its cemetery, with those knife-thin, tilting headstones, each adorned and surrounded by shards of broken glass, and the bordering trees full of suspended bottles. To ride by that half-acre graveyard plot after sunset, and after having laid my adoring eyes on Angie; to hear indistinct rustlings of nocturnal animals in the brush; to be forced to rely solely on the pony’s sense of where home lay: this mixture of adventure, reverence, mystery, fear and trespass would come to serve as a kind of under-aura to such sexual experiences as I would have in my adolescent years– and later ones too.

However strangely it strikes me today, I seem somehow to have believed that my life would never amount to anything, that I would never know that obscure condition people called happiness, if I couldn’t be with Angie, even if, as I’ve conceded, I didn’t understand what that sort of “being with” entailed.

The notion was absurd, of course, and yet it didn’t end as I came to maturity, at least of the physical kind. For too many years, I would spot a woman in some public place– museum, train, airport, restaurant, campus– and would be convinced that if I could not know her in the Biblical sense my entire life would be no better than despair. The inane measures I took to guarantee myself, if not a conversation with her, at least a glimpse of my exalted Angie were paltry compared to the extraordinary lengths I went to in order to put my person in the way of these coveted women. I can’t even describe the sanest of those tactics, so embarrassed do I remain by reflection on them.

The tactics, of course, were almost always met with rebuff, or simple non-recognition. Indeed, such a response was no more than I expected, the expectation itself a carry-over from my horseback days. Not that Angie ever cruelly rejected me. I suspect she knew full well the profundity of my crush on her, but she spared me all mockery, let alone recourse to nasty words. She appeared always to have enough time for a brief exchange of remarks, which I both craved and resented.

None of her acknowledgments was enough. However banal my part in the conversation, I always hoped she could read it allegorically somehow, could know that my commentary on the weather, for example, was freighted with double-entendre. Alas, she never appeared to decode the allegory, and despite my knowing, even at ten, that her failure to do so owed itself to my own clumsiness and to no defect in her, I was free to regard the failure as a kind of dismissal. Unrequitedness thus became, as I say, an expectation, though being the oldest son of a mother whom I seemed always to disappoint must have factored into all this too. That, however, is another story. Or at least I choose to think so.

I will be forgiven for lacking the temerity as a child to declare my devotion to the paragon Angie. But that I should remain oblique, even prudish to this day when it comes to talking about sex seems an odd thing, so elaborate and ardent were my efforts as a young man to get as much of sex as permitted by such charm as I owned and by 1950s mores, which I felt both thrill and shame to violate when I could. Before I was able to publish the one and only novel I ever composed, for example, my agent had practically to horsewhip me into juicing up my characters’ erotic encounters. Though the first draft referred to those encounters, it stopped leagues short of depicting them. In forty years of teaching, for further instance, I never felt other than acutely uncomfortable when discussing student work that showed significant carnal content.

One problem that has always concerned me, at least in my avatar as prose essayist, is what I call the temptation to closure. That is, I may lay out a series of memories, emotions, and events, and then discover myself hunting for a way to herd them into a narrative corral. I don’t know if that’s what I am doing here. I honestly do not. In any case, I wonder if my unease in talking about sex out loud or on the page may go back to a certain horseback ride after dark, when – full of vague lust, longing, and melancholy– I passed what was then referred to as the Colored Graveyard. The sense, as I lingered under Angie Morton’s window, that I was on the brink of an exciting but forbidden trespass may have been further impressed on body and soul by my traveling on horseback by those darkened cabins, each so full of mystery, then under those suspended bottles, which seemed to betoken a universe I had no right to visit. That, after all, was what made it so scintillating to imagine.

—Sydney Lea

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SYDNEY LEA is Poet Laureate of Vermont. His selection of literary essays, A Hundred Himalayas, was published by the University of Michigan Press in September, 2012. Skyhorse Publications just brought out A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife, and in April, his eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty, is due from Four Way Books. His most recent collection of poems is Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Selected Spiritual Poems, from publishers Wipf and Stock. His 2011 collection is Young of the Year (Four Way Books).

He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. Of his nine previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000) was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner, and the book is still available in paper from Story Line Press. His 1994 collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, was re-issued in paper by the Lyons Press in 2003. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, where he is active in statewide literacy and conservation efforts.

The Sydney Lea NC Archive

Sydney Lea is the former Poet Laureate of Vermont (2011-2015). He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. His poetry collection Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000) was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Another collection, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont College of Fine Arts and Middlebury College, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. His selection of literary essays, A Hundred Himalayas, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2012, and Skyhorse Publications released A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife in 2013. In 2015 he published a non-fiction collection, What’s the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long (many of the essays appeared first on Numéro Cinq). His twelfth poetry collection, No Doubt the Nameless, was published this spring by Four Way Books.

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Books Made of Paper: Essay — Fleda Brown

Oct 152012

Herewith a lovely, touching, immaculately detailed essay about books and reading by Fleda Brown who is the former Poet Laureate of Delaware and Sydney Lea’s friend (Syd is my old friend and the current Poet Laureate of Vermont) which is how I came by “Books Made of Paper.” As Syd explains: “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals — see attachment); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.”

Numéro Cinq is just the place, apparently, for we have published two of Syd’s essays, “Unskunked” and “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know“. And now we have Fleda Brown’s response, the other voice in the conversation, and she begins with a sweet evocation of childhood and libraries and books — the little girl climbing the narrow dusty steps to the room of stacked books. Oh, to have written the lines: “I think of everything as worn, the floors, the stacks themselves, the central desk. I was entering a privacy, a sanctum with hidden grottos, secrets. All that I did not know felt like an emptiness in my skinny body.”

There is some dazzling yet subtle intimacy in these essays Syd and Fleda are writing; they speak to the reader but also straight to each other, old, literate friends for whom memory and books are the lingua franca. It’s a huge pleasure and privilege to have them here on NC.

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The old libraries were upstairs. Up long, narrow stairs. Maybe not all of them, but some. The one I knew. As if it were a secret, a garret. They were all musty. Or some of them. Or, the only one I knew back then, with its severe guardian, or one who seemed severe, who had severe bones and counted the books to the limit of six. When you’re small, I suppose the world itself outside of family feels severe, rule-bound, alien. But what do I know of what it was like for others? I would climb the dark stairs on Saturdays to where they opened out into the grand, narrow stacks, and I would meander my way among them, not a clue what I wanted, how to choose, except by heft, texture, print. All the covers were red, green, or brown cloth-like texture on hardboard of some sort, all the titles pressed into the board in black or gilt, all worn. I think of everything as worn, the floors, the stacks themselves, the central desk. I was entering a privacy, a sanctum with hidden grottos, secrets. All that I did not know felt like an emptiness in my skinny body. What I could know was stacked and turned away, spines out, forbidding, colluding, pulling at me. I was helpless and hopeless, and when I picked out my six, I had no idea if they were the right ones. If they were the ones that would reveal to me any part of what I needed for my soul.

Before that, I remember nothing of libraries. I remember story hour in Middlebury, all of us hanging up our snowsuits and sitting in a circle. I remember the circle but not the stories. How was it that the stories went into me and lodged somewhere unreachable yet sent their perfume into the crevices of my character? I remember the semicircle of first grade, sounding out syllables one by one to hear the ruckus when Dick and Jane chased Spot around the yard. “No, Spot!” Jane called when the leaf pile flew into the air, pictures and words speaking in unison. I can smell the perfect certainty of the book, the waft of its origin, of organic matter. I can feel its soft, cloth-like pages with their slight sheen.

What did I read, after I could? Mostly easy books, below my level, for a long time. I was a lazy child in that way, wallowing alone in my own mind, wanting my mind separate, I guess, from the struggles toward a book’s difficult language, difficult plot. I read and re-read Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, my favorite book in grade school, the story of orphaned children who set up their home in a boxcar, who made it theirs by collecting cracked dishes from a nearby dump, dipping water from a convenient stream, going into town only to work briefly for a few potatoes, a little bread. I loved the way they distrusted the adult world’s ability to look after them and went at it for themselves. I loved their small world. Home was a miniature windowless island on rusted rails on the outskirts of so-called civilization. I also loved The Good Master, by Kate Seredy, the story of a smart and wild Hungarian girl who was partially tamed by her kind uncle. I look it up, now. Amazon has copies in a new cover, but Wikipedia shows the original heart-shape on a blue background. It is only that version that I want. With the jacket a little frayed from use. But it’s long gone, and even if I could have an exact replica, or the original bought from some used book dealer, I would not. It’s the one on our cottage shelves that I want. It is the nine-year-old reading it over and over on long summer days that I want. Not me now. And Heidi. Another wild girl noticed and loved into good behavior by her kind uncle. Later when my friends were reading Black Beauty; I was being a horse, galloping across the playground. But not reading the stories. I read the Hardy Boys, some of them. I read Nancy Drew, some of them.

What I remember rather than stories themselves is the feel of reading. The way the book and I came together as if we were enclosed under gauze netting, the outside world barely whispering. I remember the graininess, the slightly darkened paper, the words actually pressed into them, the texture of the pressing. My body curled, holding in the story. When I was a teenager, my grandparents gave me a stack of old Readers’ Digest Condensed books. I read them all, one after the other, lying in bed on summer mornings, lying in bed the month I had mono and had to stay home from school. Easy reading. Lazy.

It was as if my mind was needed elsewhere, to just live, to figure out my own life, to muddle through the day-by-day. All I could afford was this small turning away, this coasting into the heart of someone else’s life. Through high school, I read what I had to—history, the sterile excerpts in my English anthology, I’m not sure what else. Nothing stands out. Even the most modest of writers’ memoirs typically tout a list of books read by high school that I hadn’t even heard of until mid-college.

Ah, college. I should mention I got myself married before I even set foot in the door of college. That’s another story. But within that new stability, that safety, a wide and unforseen world began to present itself. My freshman reading list drove me wild with terror and joy. All I remember is that there were many pages in small type. Dickens, Camus, Tolstoy, maybe. One Christmas holiday, I read War and Peace, page by gloriously laborious page. I have a memory of reading it under a tree in the warmth of a winter afternoon in Arkansas, the snow of Moscow all around me.

Maybe we love what we love because it’s hard going. Maybe we love it because we’re supposed to. Maybe we don’t love it at all, but want to prove something to ourselves. All I know is that my mind quivered with new ideas, with ratification of old ones, with the sheer physical weight of other people’s words I cradled like a baby in my arms back and forth to class. I don’t remember any back packs. Girls cradled their books and notebooks, stacked in their arms like a baby up to the chin. Boys carried them in one arm alongside. Knowledge had heft and weight, it pressed itself onto the page, it spread itself and turned itself in the breeze like leaves.

Meaning was an amalgam of the physical object: the book, its cover, its pages, and where the words flew into my mind and rearranged themselves according to the whims of my nature. I think it is not the grand and classic narrative, the movement of events, that held the meaning, but the feeling, the interstices, the spaces when I looked up from the page, where I stopped to scribble, and where, later, I brought along a whiff of what was there, to permeate my thoughts.

I am very visual, more than anything, and I would—and still do—recall what the page looks like, how far down the page, whether octavo or verso, where the lines I love appear. Their meaning has to do with font, with ink, with crispness, delicacy, or heaviness of the paper itself. The Norton anthologies with their biblically thin pages, the Boxcar Children with its sturdier ones, my Scotch-taped college copy of Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America, where D.H. Lawrence’s “Whales Weep Not!” begins almost at the bottom of a page and fills up the next one. Where “urgent” and “urge” and “ice-bergs” are circled, with the note in the top margin, “[incantatory], and, and, and,” holding my younger and excited self on the page forever. At the top margin of Robert Graves’ poems, “always the practical impossibility, transcended only by miracle, of absolute love continuing between man and woman.” My hand, Graves’s words, Miller Williams’ quoting them in class. Each part of a whole, a meaning. Yeats’ “Second Coming,” my ink drawing of a gyre, one triangular whirlwind on top of the next, with the note, “most rests upon A Vision, cataclysm every 2000 years.”

The number of marks on a page is a measure of how engaged I am. Pen or pencil doesn’t matter. For my husband, an Eighteenth Century scholar, books are sacred artifacts, or something close. He will not dog-ear a page of a book or mark it (except back when he was teaching), even when it’s a cheap paperback. For him, it’s respect for the tradition of the book, for the author, for the paper. I, however, want to mark how my mind is moving in and out of the author’s mind. I think of our work as a partnership, and my role involves scribbling in margins. In a novel with a strong plot, I mark nothing, my mind dutifully, practically, racing forward.

On the Kindle, it is possible to underline sections, and then call them up, along with the relevant passages. You can then click on those and return to the page on which they appeared. Very convenient. You can take notes, only that is harder. You have to type them in on the little keypad. I bought a Kindle. I use it for maybe a quarter of my reading. I like being able to summon books from the ether and have them magically appear. I appreciate not having so many ephemeral paperbacks pile up that I have to figure who to give them to afterward. The print is good on the Kindle: neat serifs, soft background. No doubt whole committees have scientifically assessed the brightness of the screen, the font, the movement of the eye. Good job.

As my eye moves down the Kindle “page,” I am aware of the words as barely being there, disappearing with a click to the next page, gone forever if I remove the book from my device. I feel the futility of saving anything, and interestingly, therefore, I begin to view my mind as the repository, rather than the bookshelf. I am my own bookshelf. And of course even I can’t hold on to much. My mind is slippery and unreliable, unlike the firm book between covers. Unlike the world I imagined existed, the permanent one in the past, the better one, with manners, with tact, with grace and a clear list of what the well-read person has on her shelves.

I love the actual book. I am okay with the Kindle. What’s lost, what’s gained is hardly worth talking about because what’s here is here and won’t go away. Humans will always find the shortest path, given a chance. I just downloaded my first book of poems: Jane Hirshfield’s Come, Thief. I’d heard poetry was a formatting problem for e-books, but this one seems fine, if sterile. I will probably use the Kindle mostly for fiction that I intend to get rid of later.

A poem cries out for paper, in my mind. It wants to be located, pinned down. I’m fine hearing a poem spoken or read, but I want to know it resides, at last, on what is for me its native habitat, the page. Why else the fuss with line endings, with indentations, with stanza breaks? Why else do poets argue with their publishers about fonts and point size? Of all genres, it seems that poetry most wants to be read simultaneously by eye and mind.

There’s nothing more or less “real” about the words on Kindle versus the words pressed onto paper. The words themselves are not real. They’re metaphors for what we “see” (also not “real”) as we read. I could deconstruct all the way down, but everybody knows that. What matters is the relationship with meaning that each insinuates.

Someday this conversation is going to be so dated! Who cares if the molecules form themselves into pixels or press themselves into ink? What difference did it make when Gutenberg began pressing one after another pages, each a copy of the first? Was the work less authentic, being no longer in the delicate script of the copier? Are stone hieroglyphs “better” than print, being more permanent, more solid?

I am the generation who’s been knocked on its tail by the systematic unmooring of all we held sacred. Never in human history has the past disappeared so quickly while at the same time remaining perpetually with us in film and TV. Our first little black and white Zenith TV entered our home when I was 13, my first computer when I was 40. After a traumatic struggle, I learned to love the word as it flashes at me from my screen. I love it on the page, I love it flying around in the air. I am a convert, mostly.

At the same time, I’m sad. I think only those of us who were young in a different world know what it is to move more slowly within it, to feel its edges as unrelenting rather than as possessing the infinite regress of the screen. To walk up the many steps to the library, its elevation a signifier of the invisible grandeur of its holdings—even the word “holdings” both warm and forbidding—pull open the long wooden card catalog drawers and run our finger along the cards softened by years of our predecessors, miss the right card, look again and find it! And write down the call numbers on a scrap of paper with a stub of a pencil, then stand in the crevasse between stacks letting our eye travel until—there it is!—our book. By now it is our book only, the one we looked for with our hands and feet and eyes, and found. The one chosen from the long, skinny drawer of cards. This one. The librarian stamps the borrower’s card and slips it into the pocket at the back of the book. We can read who else has checked out the book. The names remain until that card is full and has to be replaced. Oh, this book hasn’t been checked out in six years! How smart we are to have re-discovered it! We carry it home, place it on the table, and open it, the end of one journey, the beginning of another.

Not that people don’t still do this. But when it was the only way, it seemed more important. Even the book felt somehow more necessary, a lifeboat in a storm, a lone squeee of a radio signal in the wilderness. When each book went through several printings, we could trace that in the front matter, and marvel at how many people must have read it. People. That’s what I mourn, I guess. The thumbprint, the smudge, the marginal note, the hand that works the press. The hand, its slow and sometimes clumsy articulations. The universe is slow, really. The sun takes its own sweet time coming up and going down, tides come and go with time enough between for a sand castle to be built. No matter that it will be washed away. It was something: tall, many crenellated, gritty, its doors and windows made of our own fingerprints. It was right out of King Arthur. You could see the knights crossing the moat-bridge, clamoring their way right out of the book.

— Fleda Brown

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Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know — Sydney Lea

Sep 062012

Sydney Lea has three books coming out, including his new essay collection A Hundred Himalayas (University of Michigan Press) this month. At an age when old dogs curl up before the fire and dream ancient dreams, Sydney is all spark and vigor which I find endlessly appealing and optimistic. Sydney is also the Poet Laureate of Vermont, and I guess poet laureates hobnob in ways that mere mortals don’t. He and Fleda Brown, recently Poet Laureate of Delaware, have been writing essays back and forth. As Sydney writes, “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.”

Earlier on these pages I published the essay “Unskunked” which is part of this poet laureate interchange. In “Unskunked” we were treated to the image of the author running naked through the dark and dripping forest. In “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know,” Sydney Lea waxes less overtly spectacular and delivers a lovely, wise account of his education as a young poet. He is a paradoxical intellect; part athlete, hunter and woodsman; part scholar; mostly a poet. This is the story of how these impulses somehow coalesced around his admiration for what we might call the New England old timer (in 2012, there aren’t many of these left). At the center of this is an idea of manliness (not macho posturing but old fashioned manly virtue — a good thing).

Sydney Lea is a great friend and former colleague from my early days at Vermont College of Fine Arts. It’s a source of deep satisfaction that he has found Numéro Cinq a congenial home for his work.

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When I was young, who thought I’d choose poetry as my prime mode of knowing the world?

Not I. It’s true that as a high school punk, despite my enthusiasm for football and my wilder one for hockey, despite my commonplace tough-guy posturing, practiced by so many of us guys at that stage of life, I did secretly like to think of myself as a bit arty too. I was a musician. I could sing. I even thought I drew pretty well. I was a big cheese in the dramatic club, as a senior playing Oedipus in the eponymous play (a lisping king, who addressed “generationth of the living in the land of Thebeth”).

But I don’t remember writing poems, save maybe the sorts that any person may have written, and that he hopes have long since utterly biodegraded: rants about being ditched by a girlfriend, just for the tritest example.

I was also a pretty good student. Indeed, had it not been for what would now be diagnosed as a mathematical learning disability, my GPA would have been of the very highest. My truest proficiency was foreign languages, a gift nourished by the best instructor I ever had at any level, Ted Wright, who taught French. I began to speak the tongue pretty quickly, and I recall how strange it was that the words and the grammar often almost seemed to be granted me by some power outside myself.

It’s a feeling I would later come to recall – if not as often, naturally, as I could wish – when I composed a poem successful in my own eyes.

It’s at once simple and weird: words and phrases, whatever the language, simply enchant me, seduce me, especially if I hear them. Things spoken in my presence, if they have a particular, inexplicable resonance, will lodge themselves in my mind for decades. For example, I lately remembered a friend’s describing the death of his farmer uncle, who fell dead in his tracks while shutting the tailgate of his truck on a calf bound for the abattoir. I heard that description, unremarkable in most respects, about forty years ago. I wrote the poem last week.

Like my exemplar Robert Frost, I want my poems to have something of the ring of actual talk in them. But that’s to get ahead of myself. The college I chose had no writing courses as we know them in our era of too-rampant MFAism. But somehow, on my own, I started to feel an itch to write, which I did, my only audience, really, being my roommates, who tended to think I was good enough, if they thought about my work at all. My genre was short fiction, and I wrote a lot of it in those four years; it seemed to keep me balanced somehow, while everything else – including the alcoholism that would plague too many later years – was doing just the opposite.

Ultimately, of course, graduation loomed, and I had to figure out what I might do. Yale had accepted me as a grad student in French, but much as I loved the language and the literature, something in me recoiled from living as a kind of literary expatriate. I never imagined applying to a place like Iowa, though quantitatively, my portfolio would have permitted me to. (Who knows about the quality?) I had barely even heard of any of the far fewer MFA programs that existed in those days. I never dreamed, either, of Being a Writer. Professional writing, I assumed, was something other people did; there must be some secret to it, and no one had shared it with me.

I did not want to go to Vietnam, as one those roommates did, becoming one of the earliest casualties of that wrong-headed adventure. And so, because schoolteachers were exempt from the draft at that time, I elected to go back to my own private high school, having no credentials to teach in a public one.

I taught French and English, and came to understand how Ted Wright managed to be so inspired and inspiring a teacher. He simply committed himself to that end every minute of the day right through the evening’s class preparation. No one messed with Ted: he was a big, muscular guy, the football coach, a former semi-pro pitcher. At a mere 21, I didn’t have that sort of gravitas, and I devoted a lot of time to quashing the same sort of ill discipline I’d imposed on all my other teachers, now my forgiving colleagues, just a few years before.

Top quality high school teachers are, to my mind, the heroes of American education. They deserve to be paid a lot more, and college teachers (especially those at the sorts of “prestige” institutions where I myself have taught) a good deal less. To say it tersely, even after one year in a pretty cushy job at that level, I knew I didn’t have the endurance and commitment Ted did. In deed, I concluded there wasn’t enough money in anyone’s bank to keep me at his sort of work. Too hard, too demanding, too much time just being present.

So I did go to grad school after all, not in French, but not in English either. I did comparative literature, wanting to use my languages while I focused on fiction and poetry as fields of study. I was too naïve to know that comparative literature was just then leading such study in the “theoretical” direction that has made it unappealing to me and apparently – judging from the radical shrinkage in literature majors at the majority of colleges – to most students.

Not that my dabbling in theory didn’t have its heady moments. I particularly recall a fabulous seminar on European Romanticism, presided over by the second best of my many teachers, Geoffrey Hartman. And yet Geoffrey became, quite unintentionally, a bit of a villain in my history. I had settled on a perfectly conventional dissertation topic, Frost and the Romantics, but he persuaded me to expand one of my seminar papers, an examination of several supernaturalist authors of the nineteenth century, most of them deservedly forgotten. Unlike my other choice, he averred, this would be “a real contribution.”

Contribution? What about nightmare? To indicate how sheep-like I’d been in acceding to my professor’s suggestion, most of my texts were written in German, the one major western European language I didn’t really command, which meant that I was forevermore rifling through the stacks for translations from the original into French, Italian or Spanish, few being available in my native tongue.

Good Lord…

In due course I took a job at Dartmouth College, without, however, having finished that accursed dissertation. Indeed, it would take me more than four years to do so.

There were no writing courses at Dartmouth in those days, any more than there had been at Yale when I was there. But a fair amount of clamor arose from students for that lack to be remedied. The result, in my second year, was English 70, an omnium-gatherum offering in which students could write fiction, poetry, drama, personal essays, what have you?

The heavies of the department, many of them good people and true, to be sure, were exclusively male – women adjuncts were referred to as “lady lecturers”! – and white and old, and at least marginally Christian. (These descriptives fit me better as I write this than they fit the people in question then; but such, in my late twenties, was my regard for them, one and all.) They assigned English 70 to me, of all people.

This was meant, though, as an act of kindness. Since in the eyes of those senior colleagues, such a course was not a “real” one at all, not the kind that demanded any genuine thought or preparation, I would have more time to complete my burdensome dissertation.

And yet a strange thing happened (or perhaps not so strange). In teaching that course, ineptly, I’m sure, given my utter lack of credentials, I found that old itch returning. It had been suppressed for more than half a decade, but now I began to write again myself.

I began, though, to write poetry. Why? Well, pardon a detour to something very relevant: on my father’s side, my family has had a relation to a remote part of Maine that now goes back generations. In these times, my brother and sisters collectively own our cabin there. My time in the neighborhood had exposed me to certain notable characters, ones who would be 120 or so if they lived still. These were men and women whose early lives had preceded the advent of power tools, so that the male lumberjacks had cut millions of board feet by hand. And to call the females “housewives” would be downright laughable: they lacked all domestic conveniences we take for granted. Stunningly hardworking people, they quite literally kept the home fires burning, cooked in wood-fired ovens, slaughtered chickens, skinned game, cleaned fish and did whatever else was called for to sustain a homestead.

Because these people had no electricity, they of course had no radio either, let alone movie theaters or the great drug television. No, they had to make their own amusement, and as a result, man and woman alike were fabulous raconteurs. Their magical turns of phrase ring in my head every day: some get into my conversation, a lot into my poems, as it were, in disguise.

It seemed inevitable that, when I moved for my job to another part of northern New England, I sought out their Vermont and New Hampshire counterparts, who were equally eloquent, grammar and syntax be damned. And even at my young age, I somehow recognized mine was the last generation who would have known these precious souls.

I wanted to get their voices onto the page.

And yet I knew I’d prove no genius. I wasn’t Mark Twain. I wasn’t Willa Cather. I couldn’t resort to dialect without on the one hand sounding condescending, which was the opposite of how I felt, or simply sounding “off,” or both. I came to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that if I used poetry to tell their stories – or rather to tell stories suggested by their stories – I might capture the rhythms and cadences of that old-time, entrancing speech without having to imitate it.

My earliest poems, consequently, were in the main quite specifically narrative ones. And although I have drifted away from overt story-telling in my verse, I have never quit believing in certain narrative values: even if plot remains implicit, I want my reader at least to know who’s talking to whom, and where and why. Character, setting and dialogue: why should we poets have ceded these endowments so readily to the fiction writers?

To this day (and I am old enough now to be indifferent about what the Smart People think), I want whoever encounters a poem of mine to know some literal truths when he or she first sees it. I want to make him or her aware of who the actors are, perhaps especially the one named I. If I can make allies of my readers, I’ll be pleased – and genuinely grateful to them. To these ends, I feel I owe them a welcome. A good poem will be complex, no doubt, but that’s a different thing from complicated. Those who are willing to consider it shouldn’t be taxed to figure out the plain facts of its matter.

Back to the academy. One of the department elders – a man whom I greatly liked from those days up to his fairly recent death – was chairman at a critical juncture. He approached me one day and said, “People are starting to regard you pretty favorably around here, but you know the saying, publish or perish. I’m glad it didn’t apply when I was your age, but without some scholarship in print nowadays, you have very little chance of tenure.”

Okay, then… I liked where I lived. I particularly liked the landscape and that access to the old story-tellers, and since in those days one did not have to publish a book, but rather a few articles, to pass the publish-or-perish test, I thought, well, I’ll just take a chapter or two from my dissertation (a screed still incomprehensible, even to its author) and try to stick it somewhere.

Mind you, I had gotten lucky with my poetry pretty quickly. I’d put poems in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, The New Republic and a slew of high-end lit magazines. But however different things are now at Dartmouth, in those days publishing poetry was not “real” publishing; that my first collection was under contract cut no ice, then.

I took the dissertation over to my library carrel, opened it up, and felt as I sometimes have upon looking over a shear precipice. My head spun, my stomach knotted, and I uttered aloud, despite the fact that I was in my thirties: “This is not what I want to do when I grow up.”

I closed that dusted-over tome, vowing that I would go on writing poetry and let the chips fall where they might. I did not of course get tenure, but was fortunate enough as almost immediately to be hired by Middlebury College, where the tradition of writer-professors had been fairly long established.

I now ponder that cri de coeur of mine, and I wonder why scholarship should not have appealed to me as something to do as a grown-up; why it couldn’t draw me more than it did or does. Understand, after all: nothing I say here is intended as an attack on scholarship. The contrary. I have benefitted enormously from other people’s labor in scholarly endeavor. It’s only that it isn’t for me.

Or not to the exclusion of other things. Oh, I have done a few genuinely scholarly articles since, copious annotation and all, and have even enjoyed doing them. But something always seems missing when I finish. It’s the missing something that’s provided by so-called creative writing, especially the writing of lyric, though I must struggle here and elsewhere to name that element.

For me, poetry is another mode of knowing the world, one that is different from the either/or, syllogistic one whereby people (myself included) generally conduct their business. Nothing wrong with that: if Shelley claimed poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, from what I’ve seen of them (myself included), it’s likely a good thing that their legislation does go largely unnoticed.

In any case, the lyrical approach is largely divorced from either/or, is in fact an approach well described, the way Carl Jung did in another context, as either/and/or –which is to say that it enables the writer (and ideally the reader) to see and feel from multiple angles simultaneously. To choose a hyper-obvious example, with the fairly recent birth of each of my grandchildren I have felt an indescribable surge of joy contemporaneously with numbing despond to imagine the world they may inhabit: over-heated, desperate for drinkable water, fratricidal, on and on.

It is this either/and/or quality, I believe, that John Keats famously called Negative Capability: the capacity to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Any number of perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and so on can exist in a poem at the same time, including ones like the above, which are evidently contradictory of one another. In these respects, poetry’s path to knowledge, more nearly than any other, seems the path my mind inclines to follow.

And of course there is again the matter of language. All those voices, old and new, anglophone and otherwise, that reverberate in my skull and, more importantly, in my heart. To abandon myself to what I called their rhythms and cadences, to let the words and phrases, as it were, bear me along like a tide to such enlightenment as I’ll ever have – that feels, and not just slightly, like a self-abandonment (allow me) to something divine.

— Sydney Lea

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SYDNEY LEA is Poet Laureate of Vermont. His selection of literary essays, A Hundred Himalayas, will be out from U. of Michigan Press in September. In January, Skyhorse Publications will issue A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife, and in April 2013, his eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty, is due from Four Way Books. His most recent collection of poems is Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Selected Spiritual Poems, from publishers Wipf and Stock. His 2011 collection is Young of the Year (Four Way Books).