Notes on some Marilyn Hacker Poems
Introduction
These are some notes done to get my head around some of Marilyn Hacker's wonderful poems. They were originally done for a talk to friends, a women's poetry reading group, and are posted here mainly in case some of those presented wanted to have a look at some of the later poems below, which we didn't have time to cover.
My particularly admiration of Hacker's work is the way she anchors things always in the quotidian, and that is always convincing and as real as the huddled bodies and cups of coffee to banter over. I'm also very interested in the way she often weaves the poem together not by narrative or 'argument'/'point', but associations which always have a historical and political edge. She is also able, sometimes to be 'confessional' without being self-centred, largely I believe because of this and also because of her way of talking about herself very muchs through the way she thinks of, remembers, writes/talks to, other people.
Letter to Mimi Khalvati is quotidian in the sense that
it deals with ordinary as is life to do with individual lives, places, meals.
Also in that it is addressed to Mimi
Khalvati, drawing some tentative ideas out of their sometimes fleeting
relationship across continents. It
begins with the typical letter ‘salutation’, but by leaving out the name, gives
fuller force to the otherwise conventional ‘dear’, in which the person is not dear to us at
all.
Dear, how I hate
the overblown diction of
lines for
occasions: festschrifts, like elegies
making a banal birthday seem to
signpost a passage to unmapped
wasteland,
The first line of the letter proper, distances
her from ‘overblown diction’, a feature of all Hacker’s poetry, while still using the rhetorical ‘how I…’, but
now the rhetorical is one-to-one. The
dislike of the ceremonial, is a dislike
of the way in which something as banal as a birth can itself be overblown. Hacker in much of her later poetry is
concerned with illness and death, especially death of friends, and she here distances herself from the way
in which overblowing a birthday can draw attention, callously, to the ‘unmapped
wasteland’ to which everyone’s succession of birthday’s leads. The dutiful sending of birthday cars and
‘many happy returns’ renders the birthday banal, by reducing it to a social
cliché. The imagery shifts from a
focus on times and dates (birthdays, “occasions” to that of space with
“signpost”, the journey of a life. The gloomy signpost is inappropriate, she
says
when thoughts and
smiles are fresh as they’ve ever been
-
at least my brief years given the
privilege
of bantering across some table,
words made more fluent by cakes or curries
given the continued vitality (thoughts and
smiles are fresh) of MK, at least in
MH’s experience, she says, ‘my brief
years’ giving just the faintest hint of the fragility of life itself as well as
indicating the brief years of a friendship, and the friendship again is brought
down to the quotidian, not ‘overblown’ with philosophical debate, but
‘bantering across some table’, and
talking over ‘cakes and curries’.
And then in the next stanza
or by the short
time left for exchanging them:
train in an hour,
espresso in Styrofoam
cups. Ciao!
I wish. . . I’ll tell you next
time.
Bus to the Eurostar, airport taxi.
the sense of life’s brevity returns with ‘the
short time left’, but encapsulated in a
quotidian metaphor of having to move on, catch trains and planes, and so
on. MH is a poet of exile, ill at ease
in her own country and its luxury. These
are images of the temporary too.
The poem now switches from a focus on the writer
to the letter-reader, MK.
I’ll never see the
light of your memories
(joy can be shared,
but losses are separate)
though we’re a lucky pair of
outcasts,
free to embellish or keep our
stories.
She takes up the travel imagery of the planes
and trains and focuses on their common, but different, experiences of exile, ‘a
lucky pair of outcasts’, lucky because they have middle class comfortable lives
at least at a physical level. This kind
of joy they can share, but less so the losses, partly perhaps because loss is a
solitary experience, and partly because their losses are different. MK is an exile from her ‘home’ country, Iran. She can’t go back; MH is an outcast in being a radical and a
lesbian, who has chosen to live abroad, mainly in France.
They are lucky because ‘free’ and ‘lucky’ in the sense that they live in
countries where there is freedom of speech and democracy. They also have the freedom as to whether to
reveal or indeed embellish or to ‘keep’ (mum about) their experiences. ‘Embellish’ here, I suggest, refers to the
act of writing poetry in which there is always a sense of ‘invention of what
is’, not (necessarily) exaggeration or ‘spinning’.
Yours, Mimi,
silver’s brilliance on velvety
shapes in the
no-man’s-land between alphabets
you were obliged to cross and
cross to
write in the white ink of exiled
childhood.
Moving close still to the ‘you’ of the
poem, she uses the imagery of ‘silver’s
brilliance’ (not just ‘silver brilliance’
) on ‘velvety shapes’. I’m not sure I
get this. Is it just brilliance – or
thought, of speech, tone of voice – on something more sensuous? Needs thinking about. The general sense of MK’s ‘brilliance’ is
clear, but not (to me) the detail. But
clearer (to me) is the way we return now to the geographical imagery (taking up
the earlier signposts and wasteland). Not
now a wasteland but a ‘no-man’s-land between alphabets’, between the culture (and writing system) of
Iran, and England. This focuses on the
cultural transitions she was ‘obliged to cross and cross’ in order to
write. The ‘write’ here refers to MK’s
education in England, learning to write,
but also becoming a writer in English.
But she writes in ‘the white ink of exiled childhood’. This is a kind of invisible ink in which the
loss and transitions of childhood can’t be seen, or not directly. Like the invisible ink used by a spy, the
invisible 0ne, the inaudible voice; they
are ‘there’ if we have the insight/means to bring them into vision, as it were. ‘White Ink’, also is the title of MK’s first
collection of poems, the title itself being an allusion a comment by Helen
Cixous that women writes are invisible, writing with ‘white ink’ in world of
male hegemony
As in conversation ‘one thing leads to another’
by association, and the them of MK’s childhood suggests their own children
Whose children did we talk about, smoking and
sipping red wine (an Indian family
toasting
some milestone near us) in the
restaurant
tucked behind Euston Station?
At first just the question, and the momentary
though of the Indian family at a nearby children ‘toasting some
milestone’, perhaps another
birthday, Indians like them
‘exiles’ but well into the quotidian
world of London’s Euston.
But she then comes back to their own children,
now comparing the two of them.
Two women, poised
for middle-aged liberty,
still have our
fledgling burdens to anchor us,
wish they were soaring,
independent,
glad when they ground us with
tea and gossip.
both of them middle-aged and ‘poised
for…liberty’, that is having no further
responsibility for ‘fledgling burdens’, and indeed wishing the were already
free of them, and yet are brought back
to earth, ‘ground us’ with everyday tea
and gossip, hinting at the ambiguity most parents have about being free and
being left. This is another kind of
leaving, not exile, and yet not entirely unlike exile from ‘home’.
The poem ends with the imperative, telling MK to ‘think of the friendships
lost to geography’, when people, like
children, move away, as MH describes herself in her rushing to catch the plane
never quite finishing the conversation, but next time. . . .
Think of the friendships lost to geography,
or lost to language, sex, or its absence. .
. I
send,
crossing fingers, crossing water,
brighter
thoughts, bright Maryam: happy birthday.
Friendship is what the poem is about and it ends
with ways in which it can be ‘lost’. It
can be lost to language both in the sense of losing contact with people
speaking other languages, literally or metaphorically in the sense of no longer
understanding someone, or people lost to ‘sex, or its absence’ –
someone you live finding another sexual partner, or the sexual communication
between you being lost. She trails into
dots, because this has not happened
but the act of greeting someone on their birthday is an act of remembering and maintaining a
friendship. But the greeting is also a
gesture across separating geography.
I
send,
crossing fingers, crossing water,
and also positive, ‘bright thoughts’ empathising with ‘bright Maryam’s own ‘brilliance’. The crossing fingers are a hope that the
friendship does continue, that her
luck (‘lucky exiles’) holds. MH surely has in mind also, that the name
‘Maryam’ (shortened to ‘Mimi’) means ‘star’ of the sea, a brilliance associated
with distances.
So the poem perhaps like all poems is a greeting
and a wish for sharing and oneness among exiles, a closeness among distances.
MH is not one of those poets who sends you makes
obscure allusions to make the very well read feel the more included in her
audience, and sends the rest of us to
the dictionary of mythology, or Google.
If there are slightly hidden allusions they are not crucial to our reading of the poem, though –
as in the allusions I (happen to have) picked out, they enrich the work.
"Absent, I come to the home
of the absent,"
wrote the Palestinian poet
Mahmoud Darwish, so admired by MH. And
to me this poem speaks as much as absence as anything else.
The poem is quotidian in ‘tone’
also. And MK achieves this not be avoiding metre but by embracing it. The poem uses a syllabic metre.
Dear, how I hate the overblown diction of 11 syllables
lines for occasions: festschrifts, like elegies 11
making
a banal birthday seem to 9
signpost
a passage to unmapped wasteland, 10
Each line ends on an unstressed syllable, which
assists with the ‘run on’ lines making every stanza but one a single sentence. This is a little like so-called ‘sapphics’,
based on the metre used by the Green poet, Sappho. But in her stanza the last two lines were
slightly different having 11 and 5 syllables.
Hacker does use the full Sapphic stanza in A
Braid of Garlic.
At the end of elegant proofs and lyric, 11
incoherent furious trolls in diapers. 11
Fragile and ephemeral as all beauty: 11
The human spirit - 5
Sappho, of course, is well known for her
closeness to other women, and indeed the island she lived on, Lesbos, is the
source of modern usage of the word ‘lesbian’.
In the letter to MK there is no suggestion of a sexual closeness, of course.
The use of the syllabic metre, though,
embodies the idea of strangeness and exile, since syllable length is less
important, rhythmically, in English than is syllable stress. But poetry in Farsi, MK’s first language, is syllabic. This adds to the theme of exile and
foreignness the poem assumes
The letter to Mimi Khalvati is a fairly late
poem, from the collection called Names, in 2010. I wanted to look at it first because it
illustrates very well the Wordsworthian conception of poetry as ‘a man speaking
to men’, by which Wordsworth would have meant
woman, and women, as well. Much of his own poetry was written in fact,
to his sister. And it illustrates the
quotidian ambience so typical of Hackers, and Wordsworth’s poetry. Hacker is in other ways, of course, very
unlike Wordsworth, in particular in being an urban poet, and in her treatment
of ‘home’ from the viewpoint of an exile.
Marilyn Hacker’s Love,
Death and the Changing is a narrative poem told in a sequence of sonnets
about the relationship of the ‘I’ of the poem to a much young woman. The younger woman is attached to someone
else at first and must lusted after.
Eventually she takes up with ‘I’ and we get descriptions of their life
together, punctuated by many separations in which the the poet expresses a great
deal of longing. Eventually the younger
woman cools and at the end the relationship is ended by her. Hacker uses a good deal of the romantic love
tradition, and often recalls the sonnets of Shakespeare (many of which are
themselves said to be homosexual love poems).
Here is one example sonnet from the very long sequence (219 pages). This sonnet does not following the
Shakespearean rhyme scheme, ending in a couplet.
Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like
this? a
Before a face suddenly numinous, b
her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate c
again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss? a
It’s documented torrents are unloosed d
by such events as recently produced d
not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us, b
one point of Maalox,
one of Kaopectate. c
My eyes and groin are permanently swollen, e
I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless f
- and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in. e
Although I’d cream my jeans touching your
breast, g
sweetheart, it isn’t lust: it’s all the rest g
of what I want with you that scares me shitless. f
The poem, like most sonnets, is in two
parts, a topic (first eight lines, or
octave) and a comment (last six lines,
or sestet). Traditionally these are
often broken down into two four liners (quatrains) in the topic, and two (three
liners (tercets) in the sestet. Hacker’s
rhyme scheme doesn’t underline this second subdivision, but the grammar does with the question mark
after ‘kiss’ and ‘in’. But her rhyme
scheme does reinforce the larger scale division into two, since the rhymes in
the first part interconnect, and so do this in the second part, but not with
each other.
I’ve changed the original layout above simply
to bring out the structure, the
traditional ‘petrarchan’ shape She evokes the lesbian lover, Sappho with a
rhetorical question, and the effects of
love and longing are expressed in clear, indeed medical, terms. There is no talk of ‘love’ in the spiritual
sense, by plenty about the effects of lust.
It seems that the new affair is started in the sense that the desire to
be lovers is acknowledged in both of them,
but the and MH describes the physical effects of it, the watering eyes and melting knows,
lactation indeed. And it creates stomach
ailments to be relieved by pills!
After the invocation of Sappho and ‘guts’ she
refers to ‘a face suddenly numinous’ which could be a face looking in
imagination, or in real life suddenly rendered numinous, that is suggesting a
more mysterious spiritual world beyond the immediate, however immediate that
is, a way of describing sexual desire and sexual experience in mystical
terms. The same sort of ‘documented’
experience is felt ‘in us’, a ‘need’ not directly for love making but for
relief from the effects of frustration.
MH comes out very clearly here in ‘celebration’
if that is the right word of female desire, so often denied in traditional
sexology.
The ‘comment’ part of the sonnet moves from the
Sappho link to the poet’s own bodily symptoms described without any ‘romantic’
vocabulary, and again in medical-like language ‘swollen’, and the sleeplessness
is again done through the physical effects ‘a swamp to roll in’ – a wonderfully
tactile image, following by the physical effects of touching the loved one’s
breast, but here the focus on the
physical and the lustful is mitigated.
The sestet is split into two sentences.
The first is a direct description of not being able to sleep. The second beings with an ‘although’, and the
main clause of the first sentence is ‘it isn’t lust’. Lust
is, as it were, a symptom, of something else, which MH doesn’t go so far as to
call ‘love’, but ‘all the rest of what I want with you’. If this isn’t lust it must be something
like a relationship, a commitment, a need for the person. And this ‘scares me shitless’ because of
course it makes her vulnerable, particularly being a older partner to someone
who may well have other admirers, and at the end of the book, does reject the
poet. The affair when it begins lasts
for about a year.
Despite it’s broadly Petrarchan form, the sonnet does end with a two line clincher
which reminds us of the Shakespearean kind of sonnet. This is very artfully done. She’s given us a strong sequence of images
about lust, and yet, when it comes to the end, the point, of the poem, lust isn’t the point: “it’s all the rest.”
The physical imagery makes the passage erotic
rather than amatory. And perhaps a
slight weakness in the sequence as a whole is it’s comparative lack of interest
in Rachel, the loved one, as a person, a ‘character’.
The poem is obviously a lesbian poem, and also a
feminist poem in the sense that it asserts feminine desire in ways that have often been found
inappropriate. The vocabulary is earthy
and perhaps to some shocking. Not many
love poems end with the word ‘shitless’.
The poem is remarkably sustained, bringing in
friends, the poet’s very mature and understanding daughter, and many of the quotidian places and objects
and foods that are familiar in Hacker’s poetry. The end is not, for the poet, just the end
of another love affair, but ‘the end of being young’. It’s as if she’s lost some chance, perhaps of
a lasting relationship, perhaps of the joy of falling in love from time to
time.
Did you love well what very soon you left?
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Never so full, I never was bereft
so utterly.
The winter evenings drift
dark to the window. Not one word will make
you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake
from your night toward me. The only gift
I got to keep or give is what I’ve cried,
floodgates let down to mourning for the dead
chances, for the end of being young,
for everyone I loved who really died.
I drank our one year out of brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue
The poem starts with an echo of Shakespeare’s
love sonnet 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds
sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which
makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou
must leave ere long.
This is a poem about growing old (Hacker is 42
at the time this poem was published).
The first line of Hacker’s poem echoes the last of Shakespeare’s
Did you love well what very soon you left?
(Hacker)
To love that well which thou must leave ere
long (Shakespeare)
The idea that love is intensified by knowledge
that it can’t last, as by implication in the imagery of both poems, life
itself. The year of the love affair for
Hacker is compared to the imager of the time of year, Winter, which
traditionally symbolises old age, the opposite of the lovers’ spring.
She writes
who the lover will now not even think of her through the nights, and
goes on
The only gift
I got to keep or
give is what I’ve cried,
floodgates let down
to mourning for the dead
chances, for the
end of being young,
for everyone I loved
who really died.
A gift, not of love, but of sad memory, or
perhaps the poems she’s cried and is crying.
And this sense of loss is modulated to
‘mourning for the dead’ and the placing of ‘dead’ at the line end for a
moment makes us draw a parallel between love and dead, as if she’s mourning for
‘the dead’, as Hacker does, often in her
later poems. But no, the next line reorientates
by adding ‘chances’. It’s the
‘dead/chances’ that are lost, a like Shakespeare it’s the ‘end of being
young’. But then, she does move into the more generally
mourning ‘for everyone I loved who really
dead’, but metaphorically as love
‘dies’. The poem becomes at this stage
an expression of loneliness.
This poems is very full on and passionate, and written to a single ‘you’. It has a narrative unity in that it moves
from the beginning to the end of a love affair.
The title poem in Squares and Courtyards is not overall a narrative, but is full of
anecdotes, small scale recounted memories.
It deals with memory. She begins
in Paris at the Place du Marche Ste-Catherine where she lives for part of each
year. We start with the quotidian,
and a celebration of the quotidian.
Hacker describes walking home from the bakery, seeing open windows, a
sudden green
and scarlet
window-box geraniums
backlit in
cloud-encouraged clarity
against the
centry-patinaed gray
and even as we read this we feel in the writing
a sense of art, the ‘backlit cloud-encouraged clarity’ of an oil painting, the somewhat adjectival wording of a poet
just that bit too much intent on turning a scene into words, a theme we come
back to in the poem. But the passage,
for the present, leads into a sense of glory in the simple and the everyday,
the scene she sees
is
such a gift of the quotidian,
a
benefice of sight and consciousness,
and it makes her
sometimes stop, confused with gratitude,
not
knowing what to thank or whom to bless
and the religious terms ‘benefice’, ‘bless’ lead back to the loaf she has bought
which she now breaks as Jesus did as a kind of physical prayer.
break
of an end of seven-grain baguette
as
if my orchestrated senses could
confirm
the day.
The literary, self-conscious wording returns in
‘orchestrated senses’. Orchestrated
how, and by whom? By creation
itself? Or by the way she is putting
them into words. She speculates: ‘as if’ they could ‘confirm the day’. How ‘confirm’? How does one confirm a day? Suddenly we
realize the poet has pushed us to that point where we are not quite sure what
the word ‘confirm’ means. Is it the same as ‘affirm?’. Is it like ‘seize the day’? I suggest we are talking about language,
speaking, writing, organizing and making full real what the senses experience,
and confirm that interpretation.
The first poem ends with ‘I eat it’, and there’s
a nice confusion as to whether it’s the bread or the day that she eats. Both, of course, the bread as an
synecdoche of the day, the part standing
for the whole, and this idea too runs through the poem, since as it develops we
see the poem always unsure exactly how
accurate the verbal memory, re-telling is, or can ever be. It is perhaps necessarily in the hands of the
words.
The poems in this sequence are sonnets with
variable rhyme schemes but based on the Petrarchan model, where there is a turn at line eight. Here it comes after the description of the
quotidian, the second part of the poem, the sestet, beginning ‘a benefice’, where she reflects on what has been laid out
in the first eight (octave). The turn pivots on the word ‘benefice’, which
is a gloss, almost on ‘quotidian’. The
dictionary says, under the ‘ecclesiastical’
subheading: ‘a church office
endowed with fixed capital assets that provide a living.’ Her angle on this is to see her poor locale
as ‘endowed with fixed capital assets’ but not monetary ones, and these
‘provide a living’ as opposed to a priestly income. ‘A living’ chimes well with ‘quotidian’.
The second sonnet is linked, chain-like, by
Hacker’s taking up the last line of the previous one, adapting it slightly and
making it a new opening. The present
image of enjoying the simple ‘pain aux raisins’ at tea time, merges into memory
which she introduces ambiguously by referring not to herself directly but ‘a
schoolchild’, and the setting ‘like mine’
It’s
the hour for a schoolchild’s treat,
munched
down, warm in waxed paper, on the street,
or
picked at on chipped earthenware (like mine)
beside
books marked with homework to be done
while
the street’s sunlit, dusk-lit, lamplit.
This girl is described in the third person.
She
sucks her pencil.
And Hacker now characterizes the ‘she’ as her
own nostalgia which she sips, like, with, her tea. But but she sips
nostalgia
for a childhood not my own
Bronx
kitchen table
The scene’s already be set as Paris. The child she sees may be a child she’s seen
there who reminds her of her own childhood, or simply her own childhood as
described now and with now’s words. I
think probably she sees an actual child and that child makes her think of
herself when a child.
And the second sonnet ends with a visual memory
of the Bronx and its languages. Her kitchen and surrounding alley ‘have
filtered out the other languages’ of this multicultural area. She doesn’t quite hear voices, but languages
in the crosscurrents of the airshaft.
This second sonnet then makes a transition from
Paris to New York, her own middle aged
survivor’s sense of ‘now’ in the Place de la Marche with the Bronx.
The third sonnet takes up the ‘airshaft’s
crosscurrents’ of other cultures, which underlie in a physical sense, her
Jewish upbringing, ‘the minyan davening
morning offices’. But the other
cultures are there all the same and we get the Polish janitor’s son, Joseph
aged six, doing his best with English,
and then ‘Other syllables’, again focusing our attention on the
materiality of language and languages.
The turn occurs in this sonnet, here at line 9, where the mix of
cultures within her street, is widen into ‘news from gutted Europe’, that is
the war, and it’s dreadful resonances for Jews. It’s as if the news of the camps has floated
to them on ‘dusty motes’ and ‘ash’
settling physically on the bricks. So
dust becomes a metaphor for language
‘spun up the shaft with voices of old Jews’. Dust and ash, of course, are potent
reminders, also, of the concentration camps.
In this way Hacker draws us into the childhood
of the poet, although we still remember that in a sense it is not her own. But it also brings in the theme of
Jewishness, and the mix of peoples. The shafts of different languages include
those of the Jews. This partly
quotidian partly symbolic ash is first ‘spun up the shaft’ and then ‘drawn
down’ garrulous chain-smokers’ throats.
The Jews breathe the very air of ‘gutted Europe’ and Nazi
atrocities. But they are not talking about that. It is there in the language not referred to by
the language. Garrulous is homely and
implies chattering on about this and that.
But it is also language. Language is what draws them together. Talking is what they like to do.
The fourth sonnet takes up the ‘garrulous
chain-smokers’ throats’ but now over the sea, and in the present, in La Place
due Marche, the same kind of people.
And we get the wet cobblestones of the locale, the ‘green-clad’ African
street cleaner, and then what the garrulousness, the language, covers. The sense of poverty comes with the halfway
unbuttoned coats, and the outside talker’s being threatened by the rain. The clouds
converge
like boats
in
the mutable blue harbour sky.
the boats, again, suggesting distance and other
countries, and the ‘mutable’ adjective taking us back to the quotidian, the
real of what the Elizabethans called ‘mutability’, the state of change to which human life is
fated. But the idea of change comes in
in a different way, when the coffee and wine drinkers are shown to be turning
‘reality’ into this conversation,
as if events were ours to
rearrange
with
words, as if dailiness forestalled change
Hacker complicates the theme of language and its
role as a lens through which everything is ‘seen’, ours to ‘rearrange’ in the sense of how we interpret
but not as to events themselves.
Turning the news into words in one sense ‘forestalls’ change in the
sense that putting them into words ‘sets’ them in language, which, of course, will outlast our
lives. At the same time it’s this very
language that makes life, and in a
sense challenges the silence of death
as
long as someone listens when we spoke
This last line is altered in the first line of
the fifth sonnet to the first person.
The focus in the previous two sonnets has been on family and neighbours,
district, and conversation. Now Hacker
moves into her own memory, or so at first it seems, recalling herself as a
child hugging a neighbour’s dog, which
in term through ‘speech and touch’
invoke her grandmother, Gisela,
shifting the focus from the Bronx childhood to Prague here Gisela comes from,
establishing the intercultural background of the poet herself beyond the Bronx to which her family
immigrated. Gisela is recalled vaguely
because a her memory hadn’t yet ‘begun’ at the age she refers to, ‘the fog of infancy’ being linked to the
‘smoke above the camps (and Dresden and Japan) which lie deeply in her nevertheless, but primarily as something
learnt about, as a matter of conversation, language. The way ‘lives dispersed’ in the sense of being destroyed as well as
moved away from home, makes her think of
the camps as having also dispersed her possible history,
someone else I might have been
if
memory braided with history.
This implies that memory does not braid with history,
has not braided with history. But what
does she mean by ‘braided with history’.
Her own memory is not literally interlaced with history because she got
away, and yet the history is there still as a ‘might have been’? She would have been someone else had she been
a Jew in Prague then.
She comes back to the very sensuous image of the
dog whose fur the child is pressing her
face into, a memory sharper perhaps than words, and ‘learnt by heart’ on the
analogy of words, but Gisela has
‘receded into words I found for her’.
Words she is using now to create her (again) in words, although slightly
ambiguous because ‘finding’ words can be like a search into memory too.
Then, in the sixth sonnet, Hacker adjust this phrasing by running on the sense past ‘her’ and
turning into a dependent clause so that ‘someone’, a neighbour, becomes the subject of the main
clause.
‘Receding into words I found for her
delight, someone was dispossessed of her own
story (she thought) by mine’
The ‘someone’ as it were ‘becomes’ the story by
which the poet talks of and to her.
It’s not quite clear of the ‘someone’ is the
same person as the ‘early rising’ ‘”centenarian”’. She cannot be summed in in a word, centenarian’. But she still is language, ‘a lexicon’, though.
Probably she is not because this sonnet consists of a list of examples
of people made in, out of words. The
next is ‘a girl on paper’ whom she made when she ‘bore/a child’. Again
daughter is thought through metaphors of reproduction, the
photocopier, the ‘tattoo across a watermark’.
A watermark is ‘ a faint design made in some paper during manufacture
that is visible when held against the light and typically identifies the
maker’, and a tattoo is a kind of
lasting mark often made to retain the image of a loved one. And of course, again, linguistic, the
daughter ‘shares her name’. The last
example of the people thought of in and through language is her grandmother,
Gisela, whose death is described in Paragraphs from a Daybook
I dash ahead, new whistle in my hand.
She runs behind.
The car. The almost-silent
thud.
Gisela, prone, also silent, on the ground
Here again what has happened is reshaped in
language for the child who is told that she’s gone to Florida, but yet knows she is dead, and her
link with Gisela particularly is with someone who speaks and listens.
Gisela,
who took me to the park,
for whom I pieced
together sentences
-
it’s all the words she said to me I miss
The words are both missed and retained (in
memory).
The seventh sonnet takes up the theme of
language again, and Gisela who took her ‘down
to unechoed
accents’ (We remembering the echoy
airshafts). But the memory is unclear
because she’s only two. Hacker broadens
the them to take in European languages (again),
Czech, German, Yiddish, her father’s learning
English. And here she also comes back
to the schoolgirl in this mix of voices.
The
air’s thick
with
cognates, questions and parentheses
she’ll
scribble down once she’s back in her room
chewing
her braid, tracing our labyrinthine
fragments
The girl is not her. This is an girl she’s seen and imagines
herself as. The scene is not the Bronx
of Marilyn Hacker’s childhood, but the
present Place du Marche across which the girl is walking home with her
satchel on her back. Marilyn Hacker is
turning this girl into an image, a word image, of herself as she might have
been. The mention of ‘chewing her braid’ recalls the metaphorical use of the word
‘braid’ earlier, where the same them is
mooted,
someone
else I might have been
if
memory braided with history
The low clouds are the ones picked out as being
like ‘boats/ in the mutable blue harbour sky’,
associated with distances.
The last sonnet is a finale in which lines and phrases
from what has gone before are reintroduced in a different combination. Here she both identifies with and
distinguishes herself from and at the same time fictionalizes the ‘schoolchild
at the window’ who for a moment she wonders may have ‘a yellow star sew on her
dress’ – as it were, if history , time and place, had been different, as she
Hacker, might have, and ‘confused with gratitude’ in the survivors are
confused, even guilty, she sees that this muddle history ‘requires a lexicon’, that is, needs to be written in such a way
that memory is ‘braided with history’, and this girl has time
‘reflective decades’ to write it. And
although Hacker is talking about a girl, she’s also thinking of her own middle
age. The girl has time to reflect
Not
think, she’ll get old (or not) and die,
taking us back to the quotidian chat in the
Place in which being listened to temporarily rubs out the thought of death, as
in another way a poet may. And she ends
conflating the girl with her own wish.
Can this ‘memory braided with history’ be written down, turn into, kept
in, language. The girl, like Marilyn is
made to think
she
can, if anybody could
a most deft switch from the present modal ‘can’
to the more oblique and/or past ‘could’.
This is a wonderful poem in which thoughts about
history, particularly the tribulations of Europe and the plight of the Jews,
and with that more general the mixture of races in the present, is mixed
with a personal past which is yet distanced perhaps by the very survival of the
poet, and also through her ability to see that history in or through the
quotidian of her own life and those around her.
Marilyn Hacker is sometimes labelled ‘formalist’
although she has often said how meaningless this label is. It indicates that she writes in metrical
forms which have a long history, rather than in modernist or post-imagist forms
which subvert the traditional norms of metre and lineation . We’ve seen her use of the Sapphic, a modification of that in the Letter to Mimi
Khalvati, and her adaptation of the Petrarchan sonnet. Paragraphs from a Daybook, from Squares and
Courtyards is a long poem with the quotidian setting of her Paris home, very
much concerned with those around her, and her past. It’s a daybook in the sense that it starts
with whatever’s outside the widower, as it were, it links it up with the poets
life and times. The term
‘paragraph’ refers to a fifteen line
stanza borrowed from Hayden Carruth. She says in an interview
Carruth liked to emphasize the paragraph’s differences from the sonnet:
how the shorter lines 7 and 8 introducing a third rhyme break the train of
thought while not forming part of a sestet’s response/resolution, for example.
The metre of the poem is based
on stress timing, that is the number of stressed syllables per line is fixed,
whereas the number of unstressed syllables is not, although often it slips into
an iambic rhythm. In the following
paragraph from the long sequence, she has moved from the quotidian of her
immediate life to the wider historical past of her friends.
A Résistant father died in a concentration 5 beats a rhyme
camp. A fifty-year-old father was a prisoner 5 beats b
rhyme
of war from ’39 till the
Liberation. 5
beats a rhyme
The Germans shot another
father 4
beats b rhyme
and his mother during the
Occupation: 4 beats a
rhyme
the Breton maquis
betrayed by infiltration –
5 beats a rhyme
The first six lines, before
the rhyme break she lists casualties of the war. The section is based on the interweaving
of just two rhymes and mainly 5 beat lines.
However, on some scansions (mine for example) lines
3, 5 and 6 would have 4
beats. But those, I think, would anyway
be acceptable variations. Then the
paragraph goes on
collaborators were
everywhere. 4*
beats c rhyme
A grandfather, a
grandmother, 4
beats c rhyme
both eighty-one, pacifists, 4*
beats d rhyme
were gunned down by the Milice.
They 4
beats e rhyme
left a note pinned to the
old man’s chest: 5
beats d rhyme
Le juif paye toujours. The Jew always pays. 6 beats
e rhyme
Their son
had shot himself at the end 4
beats f rhyme
of the “drôle de guerre”[i]
in 1940. 4
beats e rhyme
These are
the absent fathers of my friends. 4* beats f rhyme
The
asterisked marked beat numbers could be shortened on another way of measuring
stress. The final line, although on a
strictly stressed timed reading has just 4 beats, could also be read more
traditionally, as I think it should be, as an iambic pentameter where ‘the
first ‘foot’ is reversed, and ‘of’ uslifted to stress status by convention.
These are the absent fathers of my friends
which for
the first time generalizes the examples provided through the poem so far, and
with a very effective forcefulness (the resonance of the pentameter) brings
together yet again Hacker’s sense of here and now, and the awful ‘big’ events
from which this life has emerged and by which it is still shaped.
In Braid of Garlic, Hacker interweaves some sympathetic material
about herself with a kind of elegy for the Palestiniean poet, Mahmu
Darwish. It begins, typically with the
quotidian, the necessity of ‘life must go on’ in spite of and alongside loss
Aging women mourn while they go to market,
buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough for today to
feed the wolf asleep underneath the table
who wakes from what dream?
The
wolf of hunger is no ‘at the door’, but under the table asleep, as if it has to
be placated with some titbits so that the family can survive. Otherwise, presumably, it will ‘eat’
them. The wolf, she asks, ‘wakes from
what dream?’, perhaps the dream
consciousness of folklore with its unconscious dream logic; or perhaps it is a suggestion that the
wolf’s dreams are horrific, and he has lots of them. We may recall Milton’s lines in Lycidas
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw
Rot inwardly and foul contagian spread:
Besides what the
grim Woolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace
Here
the Wolf is connected to Satan, or
perhaps evil more generally.
The
mourning is set in this conext of insecurity and social unjustice in which a
constant, while seasons change, is loss.
What but loss comes round with the changing season?
He is dead whom, daring, I called a brother
with that leftover life perched on his shoulder
cawing departure.
She doesn’t mention Darwish by name, only as one
she thought of as a brother, he
threatened not by the wolfe, but that other doom creature, the crow, death
‘perched on his shoulder’.
The
uncertainties of the seasons, and the poor, are linked then to the chance,
perhaps the Devil’s dice indeed.
Darwish
risks a final operation but the gamble fails.
The idea of death is continued here too with mention of the ‘last best
interlocutor’, perhaps reminding us of a
‘judgement day’, God or Allah is his
‘best interlocutor’ in the sense that
he’s not to be deceived.
Hacker
alludes here to Darwish’s poem, The Dice
Player in which he plays with the idea of chance and the experiences of his and
indeed all of our lives. But the last
throw, - the
epitome of life as ‘might/might not’ -
as it were, is the surgery from which the poet does not recover.
He made one last roll of the dice. He met his
last, best interlocutor days before he
lay down for the surgery that might/might not
extend the gamble.
Hacker
allows that the final interview or perhaps prayer is not to be shared by
us. The upshot is that, in the next
stanza, ‘Now a son writer elegies,’
though he has a living father’.
What
they said belongs to them. Now a son
writes
elegies,
though he has a living father.
One
loves sage tea, one gave the world the scent of
his
mother’s coffee.
This
seems to refer to Darwish’s son mourning his dead father who in another sense,
as a poet, is still living. The ‘son’
is probably a literary son, and may
be the poet Fady Joudah,
his admirer and translator.
Hacker
brings both back to the quotidian tea and mother’s coffee. In his memoir of Darwish, Elias Khoury wrote
‘and he turned poetry into
morning coffee, and dreams a sash of love’
a
sash, perhaps not being dissimilar to a braid,
There’s
then a jump, via the quotidian coffee,
from the immediate topic of Darwish to
Hacker’s own life. The
associative link here is that she too is, if not a son, at least a ‘brother’ as
she’s mentioned, and an admirer of a poet with a more direct political commitment even than
herself.
Light has shrunk back to what it was in April,
incrementally will shrink back to winter.
I can’t call my peregrinations “exile,”
but count the mornings.
She’s
aware of her own mortality as Darwish had been for some time with his
illness, and she like him is a kind of
‘exile’, though unlike him in not being exiled. She counts each day. Darwish had refered to ‘braids’ in the
sense of the entwined hair of a young
woman, symbolising his devasted homeland.
The braid of garlic is perhaps symbolic here too, being as Carol Rumens reminds us, associated
with evil, warding off vampires, and as well as in other poems by Hacker, the braid is an image of harmony.
In a basket hung from the wall, its handle
festooned with cloth flowers from the chocolate boxes,
mottle purple shallots, and looped beside it,
a braid of garlic:
The
braid of garlic, again local, domestic.
But braid might also suggest, the interweaving of experience, his and hers,
her past and present. And this
association perhaps gives rise to Hacker’s movement next into memory, again associated with mortality and
disease. The theme of morality is
underlined by the image of the birthday, those many ‘returns’ it reminds us of,
as well as the celebration with candlelight and wine, counterpointing one aspect of the ceremony of
birthdays with another.
I remember, ten days after a birthday
(counterpoint and candlelight in the wine-glass),
how the woman radiolist’s fingers
probed, not caressing.
And
we get her illness, breast cancer, and like the birthday, recurring.
So reprise (what wasn’t called a “recurrence”)
of a fifteen-years-ago rite of passage:
I arrived, encumbered with excess baggage,
scarred on the threshold.
She
refers to her ‘rite of passage’ through the disease, and also arriving
‘encumbered with excess baggage’ as if arriving not at a hospital
(‘Gobelins’), but an airport, preparing
for a ‘journey’.
Through the mild winter sun in February,
two or three times weekly to Gobelins, the
geriatric hospital where my friend was
getting her nerve back.
So
far she’s moved by association from mourning Darwish to her own parallel trial,
and now she moves on again to the trials of ‘my friend’ who was ‘getting her
nerve back’,
At the end of elegant proofs and lyric,
incoherent furious trolls in diapers.
Fragile and ephemeral as all beauty:
the human spirit –
The
first sentence of this stanza is minor (no main verb), such that the commar
serves as a pause suggestiong ‘there were’.
The ‘elegant proofs and lyric’,
is presumably a way of characterising the carefully intellectual
analysis of the friend’s condition, lyric in that elegance, as for all their being well and indeed
professionally intentioned, have not helped and have left her with her mental
derrangement, either seeing these
fantasy trolls, or indeed behaving like them (in diapers for lack of
continence). The next line is
beautifully sympathetic. How easy it
would be to dismissing the suffering from voices and visions, and to see it and
them as ugly and to be pushed away. No,
Hacker talks of ‘all beauty’, and
the human spirit is celebrating with compassion because it is so ‘fragile and
epheeral’, and with ‘ephemeral’ we
return to the idea of time, the idea of
time passing in birthdays, but also in
the seasons, and the crops in the market
at different times – with which the poem began.
while the former journalist watched, took notes and
shoked, regaled her visitors with dispatches
from the war zone in which she was embedded,
biding her time there.
She
then moves from her friend, another sick perhaps in’the war zone in which she was embedded’,
perhaps literally once, but now the war zone is her own mortal body, ‘biding’ her time having the literal meaning
of ‘ab iding’, or hanging on.
Now in our leftover lives, we toast our
memories and continuence. I have scars where
breasts were, her gnarled fingers, these days, can
hardly
hold the pen steady.
Hacker
then links together the four lives she’s been talking about, ‘our leftover lives’ and talks of toasting ‘our memories and
continuence’, recalling the wine image
earlier when talking of her own birthday, and coming back to the theme of her
own body with
‘I have scars where breasts were’
and
linking that to her journalist friend’s ‘gnarled fingers’, and then the ‘pen’
she can’t hold steady brings us back to the writer, Darwish – himself also a
journalist and poet-as-journalist in the Islamic tradition –
Darwish
whose operation fails, and he reaches that ‘utter solitude’ of the end. the ‘multiple organ failure’ is, in the
spirit of Darwish’s writing on the one hand a personal image, his own death, but also an image of his forlorn country
under ‘life-support’
Thousands mourn him, while in the hush and hum of
life-support for multiple organ failure,
utter solitude, poise of scarlet wings that
The
last two lines move into an image of a butterfly, which Darwish himself used, as
a symbol of the soul (as Carol Rumen’s notes, as she does also the image of the
butterfly with spread wings as the human ribcage). The poem ends with the ‘flutter, and
vanish’ of life itself.
This
poem is usually for an elegy in that for much of the time it moves away from the person eulogized to the
eulogizer herself and then to her friends.
But this is characteristic of many of Hacker’s poems, shaping them like personal letters in which
the writer moves from one topic to another associatively, not in order to make
some sort of point. The unity of the
poem is no what she says about Darwish so much as the way in which he is place
within the quotidian of her own life, and not as a secondary importance.
[i] “drôle de
guerre” - the ‘phoney war’
